Summer of Reckoning

Marion Brunet

Marion Brunet, born in 1976 in the Vaucluse, is a well-known Young Adult author in France. Her YA novels have received over 30 prizes, including the 2017 UNICEF Prize for Youth Literature. Marion has previously worked as a special needs educator and now writes her fiction in Marseille. Summer of Reckoning is her first novel written for adults and her first work to be translated into English. It was the winner of the 2018 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the prestigious French crime fiction prize.

SUMMER OF RECKONING

Marion Brunet

Translated by Katherine Gregor

BITTER LEMON PRESS
LONDON

BITTER LEMON PRESS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

First published in French in 2018 as
L’ÉTÉ CIRCULAIRE by Editions Albin Michel, Paris

English translation © Katherine Gregor, 2020

The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–1–912242–269

eBook ISBN 978–1–912242–276

Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England and the Centre National du Livre.

Typeset by Tetragon, London

Printed and bound by the CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To my sister

Then, no doubt responding to her own thought, she added, “You see, life is never as good or as bad as we think.”

Guy de Maupassant, A Life

Bitch

At home, Johanna remembers, a hand on the backside was friendly, like – a way of saying you had a nice one, meaning “You’ve got potential” – something between a caress and a slap on the rump of a mare. The girls held trump cards, like in a tarot game, and you could almost say that if they played them right, they’d win. Except that neither of them – not Jo and not her sister Céline – have ever won any game. But since they hadn’t drawn up the rules of the game, they were shafted whatever they did. Trump cards or bait, it was dead in the water before it even started.

For Céline, it’s not a hand on her backside tonight, but a slap across her face. Her father, furious, is almost choking on his anger. He doesn’t exactly have a wide range of vocabulary as it is, but this is worse. He turns his daughter’s face with his huge builder’s hand; she crashes down onto the kitchen floor – a heap of wet cloth. She makes an odd kind of sound, as though some bits of her have broken.