Unlucky Goncourt finalist, Sandrine Collette is not leaving the literary awards season empty-handed. The 2024 Goncourt prize for high school students was awarded on Thursday, November 28, to his novel Madelaine before dawn (JC Lattès, 250 pages, €20.90), a dark, singular and powerful story about a little girl’s power to live, announced from Rennes the jury representing about fifty high schools from all over France.
“What an adventure!” It must be one of the rare times when words fail me, I think my heart is beating a little too fast, it doesn’t reflect my joy, otherwise I’d be jumping around saying a lot of bad words, I’m going to avoid… Thanks a lot! »the author reacted immediately, contacted by phone by the jury. In 2023, the Goncourt prize for high school students was awarded to Neige Sinno for sad tiger (POL), a very powerful book about incest, also awarded the literary prize of World and the Femina Award.
This time, a writer from “black” is crowned. Born in 1970, Sandrine Collette waited until she was 40 to write her first novel. Steel knotswith the two creepy madmen characters who lock the protagonist in a cellar to make him their slave, was published by Denoël in his noir collection, Sweats Cold, and won the Grand Prix for detective fiction in 2013. His books which follows A wind of ash, Six white ants And The dust remains (Denoël, 2014, 2015 and 2016), make her a figure in the French thriller. His transfer to JC Lattès for And always the woodsin 2020 (Grand Prix RTL-Lire), she materializes her transition from black to more or less dark gray and sheds her tag as a thriller author.
“Hungry Girl”
Madelaine before dawn it is his eleventh novel. It draws its strength in part from the very harsh universe that is so well described there. A small, isolated French village next to a forest worthy of stories that make children shudder. Some families there face a series of calamities: excessively cold winters, hunger, and the harshness of the neighboring gentlemen’s son, always ready to rape the women who come within his reach. In this fragile community trying to survive, the appearance of Madelaine, little “hungry girl”wild and fearless, turns everything upside down.
Added to this stark framework are a handful of singular characters, as well as a subtle build that provides suspense and dramatic twists – two-thirds of the way through the story comes a surprise so spectacular that as soon as the book is finished, we’re re-reading it. , to discover the clues that had escaped us. The story benefits above all from alternately dark and light writing, a stark beauty, with the sometimes stale words, jerks and sentences that stop prematurely.
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