Lenni, 17, is stuck in the wing of Glasgow Hospital reserved for terminally ill young patients. “A place to die doesn’t make you special,” says the teenager. The days pass between her visits to the hospital priest, whom she enjoys provoking with unanswered questions, her discussions with a particularly sympathetic nurse and her short walks with a caretaker with unusual tattoos. When an art therapy program is set up at the hospital, she meets Margot, an 83-year-old patient who she befriends. Lenni realizes that the two of them are 100 years old. She then had the idea of painting their lives in 100 paintings, so that everyone would know who they were when they disappeared. One year at a time, they therefore undertake to recount moments of their existence. With brush strokes, pencil or charcoal, they draw the sorrows that marked them, their disappointments, their fears, their hopes and their thirst for life.
The first title of a young British author (she is 33 years old), this novel was unsurprisingly a bestseller in Great Britain and will be adapted for the cinema, in addition to having been sold in around thirty countries. Everything, in its smallest aspects, makes it a luminous and touching story that we will not soon forget – this frank and sincere friendship between Lenni and Margot, the outspokenness of the teenager, the hints of humor that arise through unexpected phrases. Through the story of Margot’s life, we also cross the 1960s and 1970s in Glasgow and then in London, which brings an additional dimension to the plot. Even if we will inevitably have wet eyes after reading it, this is certainly a novel that feels good, signed by a promising pen that we will want to find again.
A thousand years to love, by the Japanese writer Inaba Mayumi (published by Éditions Picquier), is a poetic novel that explores in another way, gently and slowly, the way in which art can ward off loss. To mourn her husband who has left the family nest, Sawa, a mother, turns to nature and lends an attentive ear to the voice of plants, which provide her with the colors to obtain her dyes. When she abandons herself to her creations, she forgets her pain and finds serenity, in the same way that Marianne Cronin’s Margot calms down when she paints. To discover.
