The Beauty of the Death Cap
Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze
Translated by Tina Kover
Nikonor is an eccentric and scholarly snob, a mycomaniac who has just made it to the Château de la Charlanne where he spent his childhood in the company of his twin sister, Anastasie. After all these years, it is not quite clear what brings him back to la Charlanne, an isolated and somewhat derelict castle located in the heart of the French countryside, but he is keen to share various memories with the reader in order to ‘set the record straight’, while he delivers his opinions on literature, cheeses, and, especially, mushrooms.
Winner of both a Prix André Dubreuil and a Prix Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco upon its original publication in France, The Beauty of the Death Cap is a darkly comic and sinister novel, a work that, page by page, becomes ever more disturbing, as we try to discover who Nikonor really is.
“A deliciously poisonous first novel.” —Le Figaro Magazine
“This is Agatha Christie meets Dexter: this novel makes you shudder and laugh in equal measure: a real success.” —La Vie
“Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze’s mycological début novel unapologetically does away with literary genres.” —Livres Hebdo
About the Author
Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze is Associate Professor of French at Durham University, U.K. She is the author of numerous books, critical editions and articles on nineteenth-century literature and French cinema. Her latest book, Claude Chabrol’ s Aesthetics of Opacity, was released by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. The Beauty of the Death Cap, published in France in 2015, is her début novel. It won the André Dubreuil Prize awarded by the “Société des Gens de Lettres” and a Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize.
About the Translator
Tina Kover is the translator of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, Benoît Peeters’ Hergé: Son of Tintin, and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental. Her translations have twice been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and she was the recipient in 2009 of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.
For Snuggly Books she has also translated Paridaiza and Who killed the Poet by Luis de Miranda.
Tina Kover lives in the northeast of England.
Paperback, 152 pages. Release date: August 14, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1943813698
Price: US$15.50