You Write Me in the Dark

In 1953, medical student Pauline Dubuisson appeared before the Court of Crimes (which reminds us of the tragic fate of many girls and women in today's Albanian society). Witnesses who spoke about her moral character said she had also been shaved after the Liberation, though they forgot to mention that she was then only sixteen and a half years old. These are the facts, which cannot be disputed. Pauline became the only woman against whom the Ministry of Public Affairs, or as the French public opinion is otherwise called, i.e. French society, sought the death penalty for a crime of love, something that no one in that era had sought, not even Simone de Beauvoir, although she saw in Pauline Dubuisson a living example of a woman destroyed by men. The author writes this novel, based on a true event, in the first person, letting us feel to the bone the silences, dreams and sufferings of a young girl, sentenced to death three times by the men of her time.

Men who understand women are rare. Jean-Luc Seglé managed to enter the soul of one of them. And not just any woman. He managed to enter the soul of Pauline Dubuisson, one of the most famous French criminals. And it makes you love her. Admire her. Understand her. Hate her victim. Hate those who raped her. Hate the judges. Hate the injustice of justice. Hate the sorcerers who feed on her innocence, her pain. Hate an entire society that, with its mentality, takes away the right to love. "A person does not die of love, but only of its absence," says Pauline.

Steeped in the colours of pain, this novel, which is read in one breath, is a hymn to life, to dignity, to love.

The novel won the readers' prize in 2016, a prize organised by Elle magazine (which has crowned many writers who later became famous, such as Paulo Coelho, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt etc.).