Sylvie Germain was born in Chateauroux in Central France in 1954. She read philosophy at the Sorbonne, being awarded a doctorate. From 1987 until the summer of 1993 she taught philosophy at the French School in Prague. She now lives in Pau in the Pyrenees. Sylvie Germain is the author of nine works of fiction, eight of which have been published by Dedalus, a study of the painter Vermeer and a religious mediation. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and has received worldwide acclaim. Sylvie Germain’s first novel The Book of Nights was published to France to great acclaim in 1985. It has won five literary prizes as well as the TLS Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize in England. The novel’s story is continued in Night of Amber in 1987. Her third novel Days of Anger won the Prix Femina in 1989. It was followed by The Medusa Child in 1991 and The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague in 1992, the beginning of her Prague trilogy, continued with Infinite Possibilities in 1993 and then Invitation to a Journey. The Book of Tobias saw a return to rural France and la France profonde. Ludvik is a man who has touched bottom. Eleven years ago he left his country appalled by the poisonous spiritual and moral bankruptcy of East European communism. Now he is back. Not because the situation has improved - the post-communist era has brought its own brand of cynicism and soullessness - but because he has been rejected by the woman he loved, and like a wounded animal seeking refuge, he has come home. But home is a bleak and comfortless place where the heart is broken and the lover has lost all capacity. Yet even when all seems hopeless, small miracles do occur, and salvation comes from the most unlikely quarters. In Invitation to a Journey, Sylvie Germain guides us with her illuminated prose through deserts of despair and the dark shades of night, and brings us unerringly to the threshold of a new and joyous day.
