Rikki Ducornet

An ecological parable set on a Caribbean island in the 17th Century. The hero is a clubfooted individual by the name of Phosphor who invents a prototype of the camera to record the island's beauty. The project is financed by an unscrupulous patron who intends to exploit it for very non-ecological purposes. By the author of The Jade Cabinet.

Ruled by his hunger for erotic encounters, a deeply wounded psychoanalyst seduces both patients and strangers with equal heat. Driven to compartmentalize his life, the doctor attempts to order and contain his lovers as he does his collection of rare netsuke, the precious miniature sculptures gifted to him by his wife. This riveting exploration of one psychoanalyst's abuse of power unearths the startling introspection present within even the darkest...

"Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group's forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom's small pleasures. As the captive confronts...

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind." Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through...

The novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with...