#BookReview Three by Valérie Perrin (translated by Hildegarde Serle) @EuropaEditions @PGCBooks #Three #ValeriePerrin #PGCBooks #EuropaEditions Title: Three

Author: Valérie Perrin

Published by: Europa Editions on Jun. 17, 2022

Genres: General Fiction

Pages: 512

Format: ARC, Paperback

Source: Publishers Group Canada

Book Rating: 9/10

From the international bestselling author of Fresh Water for Flowers, a beautifully told and suspenseful story about the ties that bind us and the choices that make us who we are.

1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and quickly become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part.

2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past reports on the case while also reflecting on the relationship between the three friends, who were unusually close when younger but now no longer speak. . As Virginie moves closer to the surprising truth, relationships fray and others are formed.

Valérie Perrin has an unerring gift for delving into life. In Three, she brings readers along with her through a sequence of heart-wrenching events and revelations that span three decades. Three tells a moving story of love and loss, hope and grief, friendship and adversity, and of time as an ineluctable agent of change.


Review:

Raw, vivid, and sophisticated!

Three is a poignant, nostalgic, character-driven tale that sweeps you away to La Comelle, Burgundy between 1986 and 2017 and into the lives of Adrien, Etienne and Nina, three best friends since fifth grade who are seemingly inseparable until adulthood takes them in different directions, only to be brought back together again, along with fellow classmate, Virginie, who was always on the outside desperately looking in, when a car, potentially containing the body of a girl missing since 1994 is dredged from the local lake.

The prose is eloquent and expressive. The characters are multilayered, vulnerable, and scarred. And the plot is an astute, captivating tale about life, loss, friendship, family, secrets, jealousy, guilt, pain, anger, death, emerging sexuality, self-identity, and first loves.

Overall, Three is, ultimately, a beautifully written coming-of-age tale interwoven with a thread of mystery that does a remarkable job of delving into the complex dynamics between friends and is a wonderful reminder of just how complicated, challenging, memorable and emotionally wrenching growing up can truly be.

 

This book is available now.

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Thank you to PGC Books for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

 

About Valérie Perrin

Valérie Perrin was born in 1967 in Remiremont, in the Vosges Mountains, France. She grew up in Burgundy and settled in Paris in 1986. Her novel The Forgotten Sunday (2015) won the Booksellers Choice Award and the paperback edition has been long-selling best-seller since publication. Her English-language debut, Fresh Water for Flowers (Europa, 2020) won the Maison de la Presse Prize, the Paperback Readers Prize, and was named a 2020 ABA Indies Introduce and Indie Next List title. It has been translated into over thirty languages. Figaro Littéraire named Perrin one of the ten best-selling authors in France in 2019, and in Italy, Fresh Water for Flowers was the best selling book of 2020. Perrin now lives in Normandy.

Photo © Valentin Lauvergne