Born to Norwegian immigrants in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt has written four novels, namely the famous What I Loved. With The Sorrows of an American (2008) she plunges the reader into the inner world of an American psychoanalyst weighed down by family secrets and traumatised by the tragedy of September 11. She brilliantly describes the subconscious of an America attached to its fundamental values and weakened by the great tragedies which afflict it today.

Born in Calgary, Canada, in 1953 Nancy Huston has been living in Paris since the 1970s. In Fault Lines (2008, first published in French, awarded the Prix Femina 2006), she looks back into the past and recounts the dreams and the experiences of four characters from the same family when they were all six years old. She thus manages to cover more than half a century of history. Through an intimate and moving analysis of the effects of the Second World War, she describes the perversion and the innocence of these four children who carry the painful weight of history from generation to generation..