Jacqueline Harpman

"Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange...

"One afternoon in a café across the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, Aline Berger, a literature professor, struggles to re-read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, when an odd feeling comes over her. Suddenly, part of her consciousness splits off and finds itself in the body of an attractive young man named Lucien Lèfrene, who works as a rock journalist. In this newfound body, Aline’s splintered mind names themselves Orlanda in homage...