Yanick Lahens, Bain de lune (2014)

Yanick Lahens, Bain de lune (2014) Overview Bain de lune is Yanick Lahens's fourth novel, published in 2014 by Sabine Wespieser éditeur and awarded the Prix Femina that year. The novel opens in medias res with an unnamed narrator — a young woman — washed ashore on a Haitian beach after three days of storm, face down in wet sand, body beaten, with the "meurtrissure entre les cuisses" that signals sexual violence. This prologue frames the entire narrative: the novel will work backward and forward through three generations of the Lafleur family to explain how this woman came to be here, what forces drove her to the sea, and what the sea means in the cosmology of the community she comes from.