Farzand-i Āsimānī: Persian 1400

Sensitive and dreamy, Célian does not thrive at school. His mother Mary, following a romantic breakup, decides to leave with him for a legendary island in the Baltic Sea. It is there that, during the Renaissance, Tycho Brahe – an astronomer whose strange destiny is said to have inspired Hamlet – imagined a prodigious observatory from which he completely redrew the map of the Sky. While traveling through the forests and shores of this preserved island where only the sun and the moon seem to divide time, Mary and Célian discover a wild world through which their wounds gradually fade. Carried by delicate, sensual writing, this first novel is an ode to the beauty of the cosmos and nature. "The Celestial Child" also evokes the unconditional tenderness of a mother for her son, a character of great purity who gives all her light to the novel. Maud Simonnot spent her youth in the Morvan and several years in Norway, which inspired her for this book. Her biography of Robert McAlmon, "La nuit pour adresse" (Gallimard, 2017) received the Larbaud Prize and was a finalist for the Médicis Essay Prize.