Living literature, for me, in France today--it's Hélène Bessette.--Marguerite Duras

It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. It's an electric storm. It started, we're not told when--and it hasn't ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying.--Kate Briggs

Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette's cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It's also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place - a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs's translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette's voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present.
--Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic - as the title may initially trick us into believing - but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true.--Saba Sam, author of Send Nudes

This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith.--Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent