Double Room
London, late 1990s.
Stan, a young and promising French composer, is invited to arrange the music for a theatrical adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The play will never be staged, but Stan will meet the love of his life there, Liv, and their harmonious duo soon becomes a trio with the birth of their beloved daughter, Lisa. Stan’s world is filled with vibrant colour and melodic music, and under his wife and daughter’s gaze, his piano comes to life.
Paris, Mouzaïa district, today.
After Liv’s fatal accident, Stan returns to France surrounded by darkness, no longer able to compose, and living in the Burrow, a home left to him by an aunt. He shares his life with Babette, a lifeguard and mother of a boy of Lisa’s age, and Laïvely, an AI machine of his own invention endowed with Liv’s voice that he spent entire nights building after her death.
But Stan remains haunted by his past. As the silence gradually gives way to noises, sometimes even a burst of laughter, and Laïvely seems to take on a life of its own, memories and reality fade and blur … and Stan’s new family implodes…
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Original Language
FRENCH | Le bruit du monde
Translation Rights
ENGLISH (World) | Orenda Books
Film Rights
Audiovisual rights sold. Producer to be announced.
Prizes
Shortlisted for the 2023 Prix du roman «Villeneuve se livre»
Reviews
"Anne Sénès offers us a "double room" in which "perfumes, colors and sounds respond to one another" in the manner of Baudelaire. Poetic and so close to reality!" Marie Theron, Librairie Charlemagne
"This first novel is a tremendous success. It is one of those books - alas, increasingly rare - from which one does not emerge unscathed. From London to Paris, reality crumbles, certainties fall like petals from faded flowers. Each page conceals a mystery, a twist. Readers do not merely follow the characters, they travel alongside them, waiting for a denouement, turning the pages with an ever-increasing frenzy. This new author, Anne Sénès, is exciting. Her work perfectly fulfills the primary mission of a novel: to take us far from ourselves and fill us with emotions, to surprise us, to make us travel in the infinite range of feelings." Jean-Paul Delfino, author of Les Pêcheurs d'étoiles and Guyanes