Until Tonight | Granta

  • Published: 01/09/2003
  • ISBN: 9781862075993
  • 128x20mm
  • 144 pages

Until Tonight

Laure Adler

On 13 July 2000, Laure Adler almost collided with a lorry and was lucky to escape unharmed. That evening, she took off the watch her partner had given her and stared at its inscription, ‘a ce soir’ – until tonight. Although the watch was broken and the face had misted over, the date was still legible: 13 July – seventeen years to the day since her baby son, Remi, had died. Adler sat down and started writing about that experience for the first time. In spare, rhythmic prose, this book describes the nightmarish sequence of events. Adler was at work when she learnedld that her nine-month-old son had been taken ill. The doctors could not explain what had caused Remi’s respiratory failure and Adler was never given any proper diagnosis or prognosis. Remi’s continued resilience as the story is told feeds a desperate kind of hope in both Adler’s family and the reader in this beautiful and heart-rending memoir.

Her own brush with death in a car crash in 2000 released the flood of anguish and guilt that Laure Adler felt about the sudden, catastrophic illness and subsequent death of her baby son, Remi, seventeen years previously. This is a nightmare tale of parental agony, medical insensitivity and the ultimate, cautious acceptance of loss

Sunday Times

Lulls the reader into a spiritual poetry

Scotland on Sunday

A sense of helplessness, of being pulled along by events, pervades the telling. The couple don't ask questions and are rarely offered explanations, so when the end arrives they don't see it coming. This is a devastating, deeply sad yet unsentimental account of an unbearable grief

Time Out

The Author

Laure Adler was born in 1950. She has written several books on the history of women, and a prizewinning biography of Marguerite Duras. She has worked in publishing and as the Director of the France Cultur radio station. She now works as a journalist and broadcaster.

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