'Madeleine Bourdouxhe is one of the more remarkable literary discoveries of the last few years' Jonathan Coe These are stories of longing and dissatisfaction, of daily life ruptured by strange currents of feeling. A woman, wandering alone and heartbroken, is first attacked and then romantically pursued by a stranger. A maid wears her mistress's expensive coat to meet her lover, but finds herself more preoccupied by fantasies of intimacy with 'Madame'. A woman gives birth on the day foreign troops invade the city, and must flee with her newborn on the back of a truck. Written in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Europe, and admired by the Existentialists and the Surrealists alike, these stories are now translated with extraordinary clarity by Faith Evans. With piercing insight and candour, Madeleine Bourdouxhe illuminates the conflicted hearts of the housewife, the mother, and the maid. These unforgettable tales of ordinary women are suffused with desire and melancholy, memory and fantasy, and lit by the furnace burning just beneath the surface of everyday life.

"Madeleine Bourdouxhe is one of the more remarkable literary discoveries of the last few years" - Jonathan Coe

"An unforgettable, remarkable achievement... What [Marie] does, no less, is stake a claim to Bourdouxhe's rightful position alongside Proust and Virginia Woolf as an explorer of the interior life" - Sunday Times

"Often dream-like but are centred on the daily life of women... quiet and acutely described... magnificent'" - Guardian

"The publication of A Nail, A Rose marks the rediscovery of a remarkable writer . . . Her lonely, fantasising women call up Rhys and Mansfield, and her strange, shifting images suggest the surrealism of her friends Eluard and Magritte . . . She has long been forgotten; now, at the end of her life, people are talking of her again." - Observer

"A stunning collection . . . Bourdouxhe's writing is absolutely one of a kind. Engaging with it is a moving, powerful and transformative reading experience." - The Heroine Collective

"These are the stories of a very gifted, very honest writer, who moves quite naturally between fidelity to fact and fidelity to the furnace beneath it, of memory and fantasy and bereavement." - Times Literary Supplement

"The stories here reveal a poetic imagination which combines the startling imagery of the surrealists with intensely female preoccupations . . . One of the most striking features of the book is Bourdouxhe's consistency of theme and vision. She swiftly reveals herself as a singular, resonant voice, and it is astonishing that this excellent translation by Faith Evans represents Bourdouxhe's very first appearance in English" - Literary Review

"Bourdouxhe's women have almost untold depths of feeling and trauma...But they are never bowed: they love, they mourn, they desire, they dream, they take risks. Above all, they never lose their sense of self..." - Translating Women

"Vivid... exquisite... stylish" - Book Jotter