Part way through The Old Fire, a young woman is abandoned. Dressed in a sweater woven with pearls, a tulle skirt and amber necklace, the narrator, Agathe, waits over an hour for friends who never arrive. With a chill in the winter air, she slinks into a nearby cathedral, where she hears the last bus leave, where her lipstick has “faded completely leaving only the flaking outline.”
It’s a strain that runs through Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novels: characters are let down quietly, delicately, the pain, like a pinprick, festering just below the surface. Dusapin relishes those minor losses, a shared memory forgotten, the unnerving look of a friend, the opacity of lives lived apart. When she writes, she told an interviewer, in 2026, everything is “a fabric of senses, of intuitions.”
So it is in The Old Fire, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. The novel opens with Agathe, who’s just returned to her childhood home and to her sister, Véra, who hasn’t spoken since she was six years old. Clearing out the house before it’s demolished, the two converse, as they always have, via typed messages and scrawled notes, their “shared language of silence and cries.”
Agathe is inured to that silence. A methodical screenwriter, she pores over her scripts, confessing, at one point, “I can’t write if I think I might be interrupted at any moment.” The visit lags on interminably, she thinks, Véra’s days are too scattered, even maddening, for the narrator. In New York, where Agathe had been living, she took long walks to still her mind, to “listen to my footsteps on the pavement, feel my blood pulsing beneath my hat.” She dated men only to “drop them without explanation,” becoming “a phantom” to them and to herself.
Alone, she is alert to the minutiae all around her, to the bee on living room floor, “its wings turned backward,” to Vera’s “sickly sweet” perfume and rosacea-splotched cheeks (“I try not to think about how unattractive it is.”). Dusapin is at her best here, not commenting on the world but cataloguing it, lingering over every last morsel — over the brioche bread and candied mandarins, the hazelnut cornetti and jars of jam. The mornings are bathed in “milky sunlight,” the trees “shimmering, clothed in green.”
Herein lies the beauty of Dusapin’s writing, each scene a portrait of the mind at work, of characters in a perennial hold, straining for something in the middle distance. Consider Agathe’s visit to the maternity ward, before losing her child:
“Nothing stirs in my womb. At seven o’clock in the evening they give me another dose. At eleven o’clock I still haven’t lost a drop of blood. I go home. In the subway, I stare at the exit signs, focus on the words in English that have nothing to do with what has happened inside my body.”
There’s a gnawing tension here, Agathe registering something almost in spite of herself. Véra, too, gives herself away, as when she was mocked when growing up and spat in a bully’s face, only her chin and hands trembling. There are emotions, Dusapin insists, that “the body cannot hide.”
What Agathe and Véra are hiding is a kind of dislocation, an unmooring that seeps through every passage. Agathe’s boyfriend in New York sees past her, he “didn’t share my doubts.” The line recalls Dusapin’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, about a Frenchman’s sojourn in a seaside town. “You had to be born here,” the narrator tells him, “to live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.”
The sisters in The Old Fire live through that winter, a world of shared pasts and scars, of selves pieced together hastily, wearily. When the young Agathe is left behind by her friends, she returns home to find her kitten dead, only Véra there to spark doubt. Agathe erupts with rage, swearing off her sister, willing her to disappear. She leaves for New York soon after, reflecting on the hold Véra still has on her, on the past she can’t escape. Her life, after all, “is elsewhere.”
[Published by Simon and Schuster/Summit Books on January 13, 2026, 192 pages, $27.00 hardcover]