Une Anglaise a Bicyclette [French]

By Didier Decoin

ENGLISH GIRL ON A BICYCLE

It all starts with a massacre of Native Americans in South Dakota in 1890. Jayson Flannery, an English photographer who misses his homeland, takes in a three year-old girl whose mother was killed in the massacre. Of course he means to leave Emily in an orphanage as he will soon be on a liner heading for England, but he will not be travelling alone: he decides to take Emily back from the nuns who have taken her under their wing.
The two of them end up in the Yorkshire manor house where Jayson has lived all his life. Emily grows up, goes to school and learns to read. Everyone in the village has their own ideas and questions to ask about her. Did Jayson adopt her or kidnap her? Will someone come looking for her one day? A policeman makes his own enquiries, stubbornly, obstinately searching for Emily's true origins. Jayson soon realises that if he wants to give his Native American Emily a true identity and therefore some papers and therefore a social standing, he has no choice but to marry her. It will be an impressive wedding and will put an end to all suspicions, including the policeman's.
Emily longed for a horse but among her wedding presents she finds a bicycle. Jayson could never have guessed how much this gift would change Emily's fate. At first she bicycles for hours on end, then days, then whole nights. At the furthest extent of her travels, she makes an extraordinary discovery: two little girls in a far-off village claim they commune with fairies on the banks of a river. Everyone wants to believe them, not least Emily. The girls' father, also a photographer, asks his children for photographic proof of their claims. The girls do as they are told and bring back five astonishing images. The village where Emily grew up had its doubts about her true identity, now all of England will be divided into believers and non-believers on the subject of fairies. In an England embarking on the wild years that followed the First World War lives an ageing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who takes comfort in a passionate obsession with spiritualism. This fantastical story about fairies comes at the perfect time in his life. He believes it utterly and completely, will make it his last great cause, and will take Emily with him on his mission to protect the little girls' truth and their lies.
Sadly, there is always a truth but sometimes it is better kept quiet.
From Abraham de Brooklyn to John l'Enfer, from La femme de chambre du Titanic to Est-ce ainsi que les femmes meurent?, Didier Decoin's readers are always plunged headlong into a storybook world that is sometimes wild and always universal. This inevitably reductive summary of his latest book manages to convey the fact that English Girl on a Bicycle harbours a thousand other secrets and a thousand other riches. We are a whole century further on, and yet today we find the same creatures, the same illusions and the same torments.

Didier Decoin is a scriptwriter and author whose most noted publications include Abraham de Brooklyn (1971 Prix des Libraires), John l'Enfer (1977 Prix Goncourt) and, for Stock, J sus le Dieu qui riait (1999) and Henri ou Henry, le roman de mon p re (2006).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: French
• ISBN: 2234062640
• ISBN13: 9782234062641
• Release Date: November 2021
• Publisher: Stock
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.5"