‘The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,’ Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France’s most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ‘respectable occupation’) entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions as she journeys fluidly through her formative years. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside cafe on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a feminine answer to A Moveable Feast.