The Furrow

First published in France to major acclaim, The Furrow follows a French writer living with her lover in an Istanbul caught in the turmoil of Erdoğan’s rule. As the city around her strains under the weight of disorder and conflict, she discovers the story of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist whose life and assassination become a catalyzing force for Turkish resistance writ large and for the narrator’s own writerly ambition. Manteau’s singular rhythm and sinuous prose deliver a novel that stretches the seams of historical memory and personal narrative. As the narrator’s voice disintegrates into the tangled language of her community, Manteau asks us to question who is telling what story and why. At once a feminist reading and fervent defence of democracy, Manteau’s second novel—and first work to appear in English—galvanizes the reader to inhabit the feeling of collective resistance.

Winner of the Prix Renaudot, The Furrow arrives at a critical time in the contemporary zeitgeist, as authoritarianism becomes an ever greater presence across the world and collective action an ever more urgent imperative.

Valérie Manteau is a French writer and editor based in Marseille. Her novel The Furrow won the 2018 Prix Renaudot and has sold over 100,000 copies in France. She is also the author of Calme et tranquille (2016) and Entre chiens et loups (2025), and she was formerly a contributing editor to Charlie Hebdo.

Claire Foster is a writer, bookseller, and literary translator from French. She is the translator of Pierre Clémenti’s 1973 memoir, A Few Personal Messages (Small Press, 2022). Born and raised in Ohio, she lives and works in Toronto.

Praise for Valérie Manteau and The Furrow

“A turbulent, violent world that is both fraught with terror and teeming with life.”—Annie Ernaux

“This book is written with a candidness that struck me immediately.”—Virginie Despentes

“I wish I could write like Manteau. The Furrow is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.”—Miriam Toews

“Istanbul, city of seagulls and boats, is, in Valérie Manteau’s urgently livid prose, revealed as the site of two incommensurable forms of political experience: the politics of force, as evidenced by the 2007 murder of Turkish-Armenian writer and activist Hrant Dink, the absent centre of this book; and the politics of the speech of citizens and strangers—conscientious objectors, justice-seekers, lovers, political cartoonists, journalists, and mothers—as it unfurls across languages in borrowed apartments, bars, on café terraces, trams and bridges, in taxis and cemeteries. Between these two political forms, ‘the unbearable furrow.’ This vital book insists on the integrity and necessity of the second politics, the fragile one we too must continuously reinvent even as it collapses. Claire Foster’s supple translation, with its lucid, idiomatic ear, supports all the linguistic variability of the reinvention.”—Lisa Robertson

“A broken-hearted, impure fiction about a murdered journalist, but also about everything that refuses to be stilled by murder: memory, friendship, dissent, and warm-fronted determination. What grows creatively and politically when we refuse an assassination’s warning and repression’s endpoint? In Claire Foster’s magnificent translation, Valérie Manteau’s words are uncompliant and heretically alive. At some point, I stopped being a cerebral reader of this wild book and fell into the furrow of its title, a sentient and incubatory field of questions. This is a book that turns the ground, making space to consider what persists in our present world of ultranationalisms and what might still emerge.”—Kyo Maclear

“This is a story of reportage without signposts or direction. Sentences slip between inner and outer dialogue. Time shifts and changes quickly, as do speakers, listeners, settings. Translated into English by the Toronto bookseller Claire Foster, the slim autobiographical novel—if it can be called that—evades any sense of certainty. The result is a vibrant meditation on grasping at a place—its people, its politics—through the words of a writer. With little regard for formal conventions, the prose unfurls as the narrator falls deeper into her ‘new occupation’: a book project about the very real journalist Hrant Dink. […] A writer, an outsider, an obsessive researcher: Manteau’s narrator leaves us with a mess of ethical and political questions about rendering worlds that are not our own, especially when we have the freedom to escape them.”—Emily Mernin, Literary Review of Canada

“The novel is a masterclass in narration, a story about one person (a fictional French writer) researching and investigating the story of another person (the real Turkish-Armenian journalist and activist Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in 2007). The Furrow conjures a blend of two of my favorite books: Jazmina Barrera’s The Queen of Swords and Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X—incredibly successful and haunting, fluttering between the narrator, the subject, and the reader, spellbindingly forthright and totally alive.”—Emily Tarr, Thank You Books (Birmingham, Alabama)

“Manteau’s vision, style, and generosity have given me access to feelings I’ve never experienced before.”—Dany Laferrière