In 2023, Vanessa Springora’s book, Consentwas adapted for the cinema by Vanessa Filho and has become a real phenomenon, carried by a new generation of spectators, who have seized this powerful work revolving around sexual violence and relationships of domination between adults and minors. Vanessa Springora’s book has returned to the forefront three years after its publication, also questioning the future of the author and her highly anticipated second book.
Titled Surname (Grasset), it is finally released in bookstores this January 2, 2025, and remains one of the most anticipated novels of this new year. Vanessa Springora lends herself to the delicate exercise of the second book after a first great success, and takes the reader into a complex family story.
With Surnameshe paints the portrait of her father, lost sight of for more than ten years, and found dead in his Parisian apartment at the very moment when Vanessa Springora is expected on the set of The big bookstore to talk about Consent.
Seeking the family truth?
Following the death of her father, the writer delves into the past and the story of an ambiguous, toxic, mythomaniac and misanthropic man, “became a stranger to her”. While emptying her grandparents’ apartment, in which her father lived, Vanessa Springora comes across a photo of her grandfather wearing a Nazi insignia, and brushes aside some of the certainties she may have had about his family history.
Surname is the exploration and questioning of this past and by tracing the thread of her family, the author links her existence, that of her father and those of those who came before. After ConsentVanessa Springora continues to engage intimately and take charge of her own life to emerge from it with universal themes.
The first reviews speak of a surprising book, confirming the talent of the author. For The Inrockuptibles, SurnameWho “gives a meticulous account of the long investigation that the author will carry out […] in order to reconstruct, clue by clue, the trajectory of his grandfather” question “a father’s non-fiction” brilliantly, until “a last magnificent chapter of intuition, of correspondence, of intelligence”.
Surname is thus a family story that seeks to give meaning to a family name (and what it represents). For France Infowith this new book, Springora “has obviously become the name of a writer. » Available in bookstores on January 2, 2025.
