And I Also Dance

Anne-Laure Bondoux is an actress, journalist, philologist, author of many novels for children and teenagers, and a laureate of the prestigious Andersen literary prize.

Jean-Claude Mourlevat is an actor and playwright, author of children’s fairy tales and more than thirty novels, many of which have been translated into foreign languages, and a laureate of several prestigious literary awards.

The two French writers wrote their joint epistolary novel “in four hands.” This is a book about the fact that loneliness and a crisis can be overcome, and that tenderness and love are always saving.

A writer married four times, winner of the Goncourt Prize Pierre-Marie Sotto, father of six children, suffers after the strange disappearance of his fourth wife. And one morning he finds a thick package in his mailbox. Another manuscript from some unknown graphomaniac? He plans to send the package back to the sender, but there is no return address—only an email address for a certain Adeline Parmelean. To learn the sender’s address, Pierre-Marie writes to Adeline, receives a slightly odd reply, writes a new letter, receives another reply, and… gradually gets drawn into a correspondence that soon stops being formal…

So an amusing exchange of letters between two writers who invented characters for themselves began as a fun game and ended… as a magnificent book.