Furies

Julie Ruocco

(Actes Sud, 288 pages, 2021)

***Winner of the 2021 PRIX de la poste***

***Selected FOR the 2021 PRIX stanislas***

***Selected FOR the 2021 “LE monde” LITERARY PRIZE***

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

Berenice, an archaeology student gone astray, is now working for an antiquities trafficking network. She is sent to Turkey to smuggle precious artifacts back into France, but her mission is derailed by the increasing political instability in the region. And there is now an added treasure she is determined not to leave behind: a young girl entrusted to her by a refugee mother. In Kilis, a small town on the Syrian border, Berenice is directed to a master passport forger, Asim, a Syrian firefighter turned gravedigger, who fled into exile following the murder of his beloved sister, and the arrival of the Islamic State.

 Back in his hometown devastated by war, Asim had taken on the numbing task of excavating the dead from the rubble and identifying the bodies before burying them. His mind clinging to the names of the deceased, Asim has become a solitary man verging on madness. Now, in Kilis, he has found a means of survival that offers him a measure of relief: He keeps alive the memories of the departed by inscribing their names on the forged documents that will allow refugees a passage to safety. Berenice and Asim settle into a precarious domesticity. He entrusts Berenice with a memory stick left behind by Taym, his brave sister who, before her brutal death, documented the abuses and arrests by the Bashar al-Asad regime in the hope that one day justice would be done. As the individual trajectories of Berenice and Asim converge, we find them in Rojava, an autonomous and democratic enclave of Syrian Kurdistan, where they partake in the daily life of the Peshmerga freedom fighters until finding their way back to Europe.I

n this powerful debut novel, Ruocco gives a human face to the Syrian conflict. With fluid and poetic prose, she immerses us in the tragic realities of war that shape the lives of her characters. The mythological thread that runs throughout the rich and complex storyline of Furies embraces the mysteries that often determine human destinies. Ruocco’s furies—the young female combatants of Rojava, the activist Taym, and the smuggler Berenice whose task now is to relay to the world the harsh evidences and the disturbing images of a crushed revolution—are the modern deities not so much of divine vengeance and retribution but of human justice.

Twenty-eight-year-old Julie Ruocco studied literature and political science and now works at the European parliament. Furies is her first novel.