Crazy Genie

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.

Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms to do what work there is to be done. When farmers and villagers greet her, she says nothing, and keeps walking. Once, she was a l...