Valerie Perrin

Fresh Water for Flowers Valerie Perrin

A number one international bestseller, a TLS' Book of the Year 2021, over one million copies sold! Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of the hilarious and touching confidences of random visitors and her colleagues - three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of police chief Julien Seul, wishing to deposit his mother's ashes on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Julien is not the only one to guard a painful secret: his mother's story of clandestine love breaks through Violette's carefully constructed defences to reveal her own tragic loss, and her steely determination to find out who is responsible. The funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, Fresh Water for Flowers brings out the exceptional and the poetic in the ordinary. A delightful, atmospheric, absorbing tale.