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Rinny Gremaud

(Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 240 pages, 2023)

 ***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

“I was born in 1977 in a nuclear plant in South Korea.” That’s how Rinny Gremaud’s debut novel opens up. 

Having lived in Switzerland since she was a child, she was never concerned about her biological father, a British mechanical engineer her mother had an affair with when she was also working on the reactor site. But the closure of the Kori 1 plant shakes the author to her core, leading her to find out more about her progenitor.

In Holyhead, Wales, where her father was born, she finds an address for him in Michigan, in the United States. The letter she then writes remains unanswered. That silence in return allows her to invent the life of this man she never knew, who didn’t recognize her at birth.

Following her father’s tracks, she visits each of the nuclear plants where the mechanical engineer has worked, first on Anglesey Island in Wales, then in Taiwan, and finally, after the Korean interlude, in Monroe, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Erie.

Never departing from the distance and the irony that set the tone of the book, Gremaud prodigiously intertwines journalistic investigation and intimate personal quest.

Born in 1977 in Busan, South Korea, Rinny Gremaud is a journalist. She is the Chief Editor of the magazine T (Le Temps) and lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her first book, Un monde en toc (Le Seuil, 2018), is being published by University of Alberta Press under the title All the World’s a Mall (2023).