Roissy

Disguised as a passenger, a homeless woman lives in Paris’s Roissy airport until she meets a man who makes her confront her past.

Every day the narrator of this gripping novel hurries from one terminal to another in Charles de Gaulle Roissy airport, Paris, pulling her suitcase behind her, talking to people she meets—but she never boards an airplane. She becomes an “unnoticeable,” a homeless woman disguised as a passenger, protected by her anonymity. When a man who comes to the airport every day to await the Rio-to-Paris flight—the same route on which a plane crashed into the sea a few years earlier—attempts to approach her, she flees, terrified. But eventually, she accepts his kindness and understands his loss, and she gives in to the grief they share, forming a bond with him that becomes more than friendship. A magnificent portrait of a woman who rediscovers herself through a chance connection, Roissy is a powerful, polyphonic book, a glimpse at the infinite capacity of the human spirit to be reborn.

Praise for the French original:
‘To lose everything and be reborn—a sort of inner voyage that Roissy explores with great sensitivity’—Lire

‘[Tiffany Tavernier] reproduces almost exhaustively the unimaginable workings of the enormous airport machine, as well as that of the people who circulate in this place of departures, in this case, also a hidden refuge. As the story unfolds, there emerges a magnificent portrait of an unclaimed woman, whose secret will be imperceptibly unveiled.’—L’Humanité

‘Roissy—those little human beings lost in a transit zone which truly is nowhere, it is a world unto itself. That of the novel of Tiffany Tavernier. . . . It is a sort of literary tour de force to manage to hold the right note while connecting with the distress and the daily life of an indeterminate woman. This book is inherently political without ever losing itself in political display. It is an overture—an overture to a departure.’—Livre Hebdo