ABSTRACT
Anne-Marie Garat's novels are extremely compelling, yet this does not mean that they make for light reading. The suspenseful stories spun by this penetrating author probe deeply into the soul's most secret scars, often revealing in the process the existential unease, sexual despair, or familial rootlessness upon which human lives can be founded. At first enveloped in an atmosphere vaguely suggestive of a worldwide computer conspiracy, the novel increasingly focuses on Seliani's solitude and rootlessness. As an absorbing complement to her powerful fictional studies of broken homes, Dans la pente du toit (1998) recounts Garat's struggle to come to terms with the deaths of her father and her sister. Whether through fiction, autobiography, or autobiography disguised as fiction, Anne-Marie Garat illustrates unforgettably how an individual must wrest his or her birthright, as well as the future, from that uneasy solitude and those redoubtable intimacies that make up daily life—or perish.
