Author based in Tarn-et-Garonne, Laure Barachin taught before devoting herself to writing. In her seventh novel, she offers us portraits of courageous women, exceptional or ordinary, who try to thwart their destiny. From Occitania to Brittany, from France to Spain, from kyiv to Montauban and Toulouse, The Summer Mylena Disappeared is the quest of four friends to find two young girls.
Can you introduce us to this latest novel?
It is a contemporary novel about maternal and filial love but also about war and peace, about friendship and the power of Books. Its main setting is Montauban where four friends: Stéphanie, Marianne, Olena and Katia will form a reading group at the Ancien Collège: Literature Lovers. They hope to find a cure for their ills, thanks to the words of great writers.
Who are these literature enthusiasts? What links unite them?
Katia is a Franco-Russian screenwriter. Stéphanie, who has just been transferred to the Montauban Judicial Court, grew up in a home for placed children in Ariège. After a professional reconversion, she became an investigating judge at the age of forty. She never forgot Mylena, her childhood friend, a young girl eager to emancipate herself, who died in 1998 at eighteen. Marianne, a history professor, takes in Olena, her Ukrainian colleague whose daughter Maryna, a student, has also disappeared. What happened to these two girls? What if the past helped explain the present? What if the present made it possible to understand the mysteries of the past? Literature, a bridge between cultures and countries, will be their link. Books will help them, they will be a way to share their feelings.
What underlies the need for writing in you?
From the world of teaching to that of writing, I have often asked myself the question: why read and why write? Perhaps to try to account for reality as a whole. Are books a refuge from the horrors of this world or do they allow us to become aware of them? Writing a novel requires a lot of work, passion, time and sacrifice. I also write to take the reader on a journey and bring them a little poetry, dreams and adventure.
In this novel, do you discuss the history of our region, but also societal issues?
In this book The Summer Mylena Disappearedthe enigma will reveal secrets linked to the Spanish civil war of which we still keep the memory, with the camp of Judes in Septfonds and the tomb of Manuel Azaña, in Montauban. On the other hand, one of my characters suffers from early menopause which prevents her from being a mother. I wanted to discuss this subject which should not be taboo.
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