Your Promise

“When this book opens, I break a promise. When I made it—what nonsense—I was sure I would keep it. Anyway, I don’t know if it was nonsense. When we make a promise, shouldn’t we at least believe in it? That day, seven years ago, we had been arguing about whether we were released from a promise the moment the other person failed to keep theirs. I argued that we were, that it was like a contract, a marriage, an agreement, and that one person’s breach of it nullified the other’s commitment. He said no, that the commitment is to ourselves. “A promise is a promise.”

What must have happened in her relationship with her partner for the novelist Claire Lancel to find herself defending herself in court? Throughout the story, she recounts how she gradually allowed herself to be drawn into a web of manipulation and lies, detailing how a sacred promise turned into a destructive dynamic.

In this gripping novel, the French writer Camille Laurens, with the skill of a multi-award-winning novelist and essayist—including the Femina, one of the highest honours in French literature—examines contemporary narcissism and the lack of empathy, and asks how love can be protected from its own illusions. Laurens invites us to celebrate love and experience it beyond the disillusionment of broken promises.

Winner of the Femina Prize and finalist for the Prix Goncourt.