"Unlike so many science-fiction novels that explore futuristic theories that are old-hat twenty years later, Jacqueline Harpman's book rackles very immediate questions about totalitarianism, the precarious situation of women in society and the survival of the human race - a mad, illusory survival in this narrative. We have Borges in The Tartar Steppe"FABRICE GAIGNAULT, ElleAfter the sirens went, life was to be so very different for the women.Until that moment they had lived, forty women in an underground cage, under the ever watchful eye of silent guards with whips, two meals a day, the lights forever burning.No sense of time or season.For how many years? Twelve at least - the youngest had been a baby, wrested from her mother in the confusion that followed the disaster, and had now reached a sort of puberty.Then the sirens, just as the guards had put the key in the lock to pass through their daily rations: the guards fled, simply vanished.The women could leave their cage, climb the hundred steps, emerge to look out over a desolare, featureless praffle under a light drizzle.They became a group of forty nomads, searching for what they remembered as civilisation", a world with men and children.

All they came upon were new fears, new tormenting questions: the means to remain alive, but no reason to do so.A continuous journey but to an ever receding destination.This story of survival after an unnamed catastrophe, on some lunar planet which might still be Earth, probes with devastating effect into the common springs of memory and experience which bind people together.The narrator is the child who has known nothing before the prison cage - a Miranda trapped in a world created by evil Propero for purposes none can fachom.The Mistress of Silence is an utterly haunting story."A writer of great subtlety, Jacqueline Harpman's theme is one of hardship and enduring dignity in the attempt to retain one's humanity in the face of suffering. Suspense is admirably maintained in this beautifully simple writing"FREDERIQUE MAUPU FLAMENT, Le Quotidien de Paris"A dizzying narrative told in a strong, simple, harmonious style. A book to be discovered"ERIC DESCHOOT, Figaro Magazine.