Fresh Water for Flowers: OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD

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My little vignettes are a meditative representation of books I love reading and which bring me comfort, and of places I visit to find calmness and solace, especially during anxious times. One of her gravediggers, Glaston, is a bit clumsy, which allows some humor in a very solemn business. I was learning a subtle lesson from the intricate lush details - about how to live fully immersed with what so many others have kept silent.

Violette shared the job of the cemetery caretaker, if not in actual caretaking with her husband, Philippe Toussaint, who was a man too lazy to do much more than play video games or ride off on his motorcycle while Violette did the work.Matt Haig describes Fresh Water for Flowers as “a beautiful, intensely atmospheric bittersweet dream of a book” and Publishers Weekly said it was “a tender and poignant exploration of love, loss, and redemption. I hope you will find some interesting book recommendations here and you will be inspired to read more. It soon becomes clear that Julien's inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette's own complicated past. I found it so moving how reverential and respectful, Violette was to those who were buried there as she meticulously records their funerals, the celebrations of their lives, and tends to the graves when families are unable to with flowers.

I am in awe of protagonist Violette’s endurance, her steadfast resolve in soldering on, in the face of disappointment and loss. Julien’s arrival at the cemetery is the instigating incident for much of the novel’s present-day plot; the story of Julien’s mother Irène becomes an almost co-equal part of the novel, woven through Violette’s narrative by the inclusion of Irène’s diary. Thankfully, Perrin avoids easy, inadequate clichés about consolation, the kind of implicit or explicit messages that hurt rather than help. After a detective shows up at her door, she starts to question her life, and we see her grow and develop as a character. You will grow up elsewhere, among the murmurs of the world, in the Mediterranean, in Sasha’s garden, in the flight of a bird, at daybreak, at nightfall, through a young girl I will meet by chance, in the foliage of a tree, in the prayer of a woman, in the tears of a man, in the light of a candle, you will be reborn later, one day, in the form of a flower or a little boy, to another mother, you will be everywhere my eyes come to rest.

Being at the centre of the dead puts Violette at the heart of the local community, life and death go hand in hand. Ever since my childhood,” she says to Léonine, who is no longer there, “I had never made a noise, so that I wouldn’t be abandoned anymore. I especially loved her musings about her childhood, her marriage, and her daughter - heartbreaking at times, yet hopeful. This is essentially a character driven book which focusses on the lives of a select few, including the tragedy that is Violette's who was abandoned as a baby and through some twists and turns of fate becomes the keeper of the cemetery.

Perrin's descriptions here too are very well done; when Violette serves a freshly-picked tomato this reader could feel the juice dribbling down a chin. A deserved international sensation, Fresh Water for Flowers is a book that raises many questions about the living and the dead, about the past and the secrets buried. Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of police chief Julien Seul, wishing to deposit his mother’s ashes on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Un romanzo che emoziona perché la vita è protagonista assoluta, a maggior ragione nel luogo dove si celebra il lutto. By then Violette works as a cemetery keeper and the cemetery is her home, the people there, dead and alive, her family.

In 1997, Violette and Philippe Toussaint arrived in Bourgogne to become the cemetery keepers at Brancion-en-Chalon Cemetery.