“Madelaine before dawn”, the wild child of Sandrine Collette – Libération

A dark novel selected in the final square for the Goncourt which will be awarded on November 4.

Authors from crime fiction are definitely popular this literary season. While Olivier Norek appears on the latest Renaudot list with Winter WarriorsSandrine Colette, grand prize for detective literature 2013 for her first novel, Knots of steel (Denoël), is part, with Madelaine before dawn (JC Lattès), from the last square for the Goncourt which will be awarded on November 4. Until 2020, she was considered a leading crime fiction author. Then she changed publisher, moving from Denoël to JC Lattès who, undoubtedly sensing its “prize catch” potential, undertook to publish it in a white collection. And it worked. And always the forests won the Closerie des Lilas and RTL-Lire prizes in 2020. We were wolves was crowned in 2022 with the Renaudot des lycéens. Proof that there is no longer much meaning in differentiating white literature and black literature, Madelaine before dawn is not a thriller but a true dark novel, murder, oppression, fear are omnipresent. Is this a good novel?

1) Why is it so black?

This book tells of the adoption of a wild child, Madelaine, by two very poor families from a hamlet in the depths of France at a time which could be the 19th century. He evokes Jacquou the crunchy when the evils