Seven Houses in France

Bernardo Atxaga

Nov. 2011 · Random House

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1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the banks of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafés of Paris.

His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad.

At the Captain’s side are an ex-legionnaire womaniser, and a servile, treacherous man who dreams of running a brothel. At their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.

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Bernardo Atxaga was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books, including Obabakoak and The Accordionist's Son, have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator from Spanish and Portugese for over twenty years, translating such writers as José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Luis Fernando Verissimo and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has brought her a number of prizes, the most recent of which was the 2010 Premio Valle-Inclán for Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.