One Day I'll Tell You Everything

The winner of the 2009 European Prize for Literature, this startling and powerful French novel is translated into English for the first time.

One Day I'll Tell You Everything tells the story of Adèle and her younger brother Axel, who grew up in a hamlet in the spectacular mountains of the Ardèche region in south-east France. Ten years later, they have returned to their childhood home, and Adèle now drives the school bus. Adèle is desperate to keep the secret of her past—of when she was a boy. No one recognises her here now, but teenagers have a way of getting to the truth.

When a terrifying snowstorm strands the bus on the mountain, Adèle and her passengers take shelter in a cave, and that's when the stories come out.

Adèle's body has undergone seismic transformations. Just like the landscape around her, with cliff faces scaffolded to stop rockfalls, she has been reshaped, inside and out, to become a woman.

This is a powerful and beautifully written story of a boy who wanted to be a girl, who became a woman, who lives intensely through her new body and through the physical world around her, of nature and the weather—all of which shape Adèle.