The Old Fire

Name: The Old Fire
Price: 27.99 AUD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9781761381799

Elisa Shua Dusapin

$27.99

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English

Scribe Publications
31 March 2026

Fiction & Literature; Fiction in translation

The building looks tired, the ivy-covered roof sagging above the brick-work, like a weary giant gasping for breath. There's a car parked under the hazelnut tree. Bracken forces its way between the cracks in the front steps. Through the window, I can see a light inside.

In the wake of her father's death, Agathe leaves New York and returns to her childhood home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. Agathe and her sister Vera have not seen each other in all that time apart. Now, they must empty their home before it is knocked down. Vera stopped speaking when she was six, and as the pair clean and sift through a lifetime's worth of belongings, old memories and resentments surface.

Tender, melancholic, and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin's most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, of the unsaid and the unanswered, it is also a graceful and profound exploration of how loss and grief can live alongside life and abundance.

'Quietly powerful ... there is an ethereal quality to Dusapin's writing that lifts her work to another dimension ...

it

is economical yet beautiful, her prose sparse and poetic in Aneesa Abbas Higgins' translation. Descriptions sing.' -Financial Times

'Higgins effortlessly captures Dusapin's ephemeral prose ... the spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic.' -Los Angeles Review of Books

'Eerie yet tender ... Reading this atmospheric novel I was at times disorientated but after finishing I felt a strange calm. In a short space - only 176 pages - Dusapin stirs up some soul-stirring reflections.' -The Sunday Times

By: Elisa Shua Dusapin
Imprint: Scribe Publications
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 161mm, Spine: 12mm
Weight: 180g
ISBN: 9781761381799
ISBN 10: 1761381792
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 31 March 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Elisa Shua Dusapin (Author) Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. Her first novel, Winter in Sokcho, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim and was awarded the Prix Robert Walser, the Prix Regine Desforges, and, after its translation into English, the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator) Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated books by Elisa Shua Dusapin, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ali Zamir, and Nina Bouraoui. Seven Stones by Venus Khoury-Ghata was shortlisted for the Scott-Moncrieff Translation Prize, and both A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir and What Became of the White Savage by Fran ois Garde won PEN Translates awards.