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Twenty Minutes of Silence

Hélène Bessette

Kate Briggs

Kathryn Scanlan

  • Translated from French by Kate Briggs.
  • Inspired by a true story, Twenty Minutes of Silence is a formally innovative take on the crime novel from the author of Lili is Crying.
  • The second book in English by Hélène Bessette, a long-overlooked French novelist who ‘should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux’ (Jennifer Kabat, Four Columns). 
  • Comps: The Bell by Iris Murdoch; Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette, tr. Kate Briggs; American Genius by Lynne Tillman.

  • Classification : Others
  • Pub Date : JUN 18, 2026
  • Imprint : Fitzcarraldo Editions
  • Page Extent :
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9781804272152
  • Price : INR 799
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Hélène Bessette

Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Cazes prize in 1954 and was twice in the running for the Goncourt prize and the Médicis prize. 

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Kate Briggs

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. This Little Art, her genre-bending essay on the art of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. In 2021, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her debut novel, The Long Form, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize the same year.

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Kathryn Scanlan

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