When American Ella Turner and her husband move to southwest France, she is disrupted by less-than-idyllic village life and strange dreams of the color blue. Haunted by sleepless nights, bewildered by her unwelcoming neighbors, Ella tries to forge a bond with her new home by investigating her French ancestors. Her research takes her to the Cévennes, isolated mountains in the south and the birthplace of the Tournier/Turner family.
16th-century peasant Isabelle du Moulin is suspected of witchcraft and tormented for her association with the Virgin Mary even after she and her village have converted to the new Protestantism that is gaining footholds in the country. When she becomes pregnant, she has no choice but to marry into the powerful Tournier family. The 1572 Massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris sends waves of persecution throughout France, and the Tourniers are forced to flee to make a new home in Switzerland. Old ways follow them there, however, and Isabelle's final shocking fate lies undiscovered — until Ella Turner's arrival four centuries later…
Inspiration
My father was born in Switzerland and as a boy emigrated with his family to the USA. Family legend has it that we were French Huguenots originally from the Cévennes region in southern France, and had to flee religious persecution in 1572, ending up in the small Swiss town of Moutier. As an adult my sister relocated from the USA to France. It occurred to me that with her move the Chevaliers were coming full circle: France, Switzerland, USA, France. That circle made me feel oddly connected to the past, and I decided to explore that connection, as well as the idea that families might carry their stories — their hopes and tragedies and obsessions — with them down the centuries. I decided to set a novel in those places so that I could begin to understand more about what my ancestors might have gone through.
Reviews
There’s a sense of light, colour and sunshine throughout this novel…An intriguing mix of detective tale, ghost story and infidelity all rolled into one. —Irish Times
A beautifully crafted story shot with vivid colours. —Times (London)
A good read: no clichés in sight, a well-made story with characters who walk and talk just the way people do. —Independent
Provincial life, superstition, gossip and malice are precisely caught, and the related women protagonists lodge in the mind. Excellent. —Time Out
Where Chevalier shines is in her clean prose and her descriptions of rural French and Swiss life, then and now. —Los Angeles Times
