• Selected by Nicholas Royle

This is an exquisitely subtle ghost story published, as far as I am aware, only in the original French. The translation of the title is mine and has no official status. Another translator might well have gone for ‘Christmas Among Us’. The narrator, unhappy in her job and in need of a break, intends to spend a few days in her family’s second home in the apparently fictitious town of Céranges. She will be on her own, since her husband doesn’t like the house; he finds it “chilly”. It is an intricately constructed, deceptively simple story of ominous allusions and artful repetitions with a deep well of pain at its centre. For those with even a little knowledge of French, the language is not too difficult. There are even five lines in English. The collection, Zoo, contains fifteen stories and is very good overall. Darrieussecq’s novels, which I highly recommend, and a recent memoir of insomnia, which I have not read, are available in English translation.

First published in different version in Vogue, December 2002. Broadcast on France Culture in 2004 in version collected in Zoo, P.O.L, 2006

You can read Nicholas Royle’s own personal anthology and other contributions here