MacLehose Press signs award-winning French novel about disability and sibling love

MacLehose Press has acquired And the Stones Cry Out, the English translation of Clara Dupont-Monod’s award-winning S’adapter by Ben Faccini.

Publisher Katharina Bielenberg bought world English language rights from Thomas Guillaume at Editions Stock. And the Stones Cry Out is due for publication in the UK on 11th April 2024.

S’Adapter won the Prix Femina in 2021 and was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt 2021, and has, according to MacLehose Press, sold over 370,000 copies in France so far.

Dupont-Monod said of the book: “I wrote S’adapter from my own personal experience. I had a disabled brother, who had the same disabilities as the child described in the book. But this has never made me sad. Quite the opposite: my brother taught me tolerance; he taught me to go out of my comfort zone and open myself up to difference. The three children in the novel are like me. They need to open themselves up to this child, [and] to accept difference.”

Faccini said: “And the Stones Cry Out is a hard-hitting book… an observation of nature’s power, a portrait of a family facing unexpected hardship, a drama about society’s attitude to difference and physical impairment, as well as a fairytale journey into the mountain region of the Cévennes in France. Translating a book which works on so many different levels was both exciting and challenging.”

Bielenberg commented: “Narrated by stones in a French landscape, And the Stones Cry Out is not only formally inventive, but also has a rare and powerful honesty. It will have a profound effect on those who read it, and can make us think differently. It bears comparison to Faulkner, and yet I haven’t read anything quite like it.”