Ten years after the death of her four-year-old son, a mother realises she has passed several minutes without thinking of him.

Terrified that forgetting has begun, she starts to write: reconstructing Tom’s life and death through fragments, memories, bodily sensations and the rituals that allowed the family to continue. Set between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, the novel gradually reveals its tragedy while remaining fixed inside the unstable time of grief, where the dead are absent yet continually present.

The narrator records forbidden thoughts alongside mundane practicalities: her resentment of the living, her need to preserve Tom’s exact dimensions, and her fear that language might either erase or falsely resurrect him. The result is less a conventional narrative than an intimate, almost fractal like anatomy of loss.

Originally published in France in 2007, Tom Is Dead was nominated for both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Femina. It also provoked a major French literary controversy when Camille Laurens accused Darrieussecq of “psychological plagiarism” for fictionalising the death of a child without having experienced it herself, opening a wider debate about imagination, trauma and who has the right to represent grief.

Text Publishing, 2009. First English-language edition. Translated from the French by Lia Hills. Paperback. Very good condition with light cover and edge wear.