THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

The wet nurse has swapped the babies. One alive child for one newly dead.

One night under a burning red moon, deep in the forest near her rural cottage, Sylvaine discovers an abandoned baby only a few hours old in a clearing, and beside it, a notebook. She is compelled to take the foundling into her care and raise it alongside the one she is already nursing for a richer family in town. But when the town baby dies suddenly in the night, Sylvaine decides to permanently switch it for the other. She must, her husband convinces her, to protect their reputation and livelihood—but she’s also bonded too closely to the little orphan now to part with her.

The notebook tells a story of a woman not unlike Sylvaine: a maid in another village impregnated by her master and later forced to sell her milk too. The mothers form a strange triangle, with mouths to feed but never their own child’s, and money earned but it never ends up in their own pockets. In an economy run by men, none can make their own choices. Until they do.

Haunting and poignant, for readers of Maggie O’Farrell and Margaret Atwood, Séverine Cressan’s debut takes off with electrifying speed on the first page, and will leave readers gasping for breath as they take in the final phrase—almost surely, necessarily, in the same sitting.