Where You’ll Find Me

Revel in exotic places in Birkleund’s new novel set in Greenland and Provence. Isle lives in the harsh, isolating, but gorgeous beauty of Greenland on a spit of land overlooking the see. Commissioned to translate a celebrated aging poet’s work from French into English, she travels to meet him in the sunny South of France. The contrast of landscape and weather is intoxicating, as is the gentlemanly poet who writes in the Provençal troubadour tradition. The author traces Isle’s seduction by both the land and her host, as well as his son. Will she go or will she stay? That question frames this lovely, romantic novel.

In three stories the author tells us what is important to know about ‘Colombe,’ by describing her at different stages of her life. First she’s a young woman of seventeen, deliriously happy to have a lover, who finds herself pregnant. Then Colombe’s diary talks of her enduring friendship with Heloise at age 11, and summers in St. Tropez, until Heloise’s early death. And finally at fifty, after the heartbreaking end of a love affair, Colombe’s swimming becomes a liberating endeavor that allows her to become fully herself. These chapters “narrate my bodily apprenticeship…perpetually in motion.” It is a wise, thought-provoking look into the heart and mind of a woman pushing the boundaries of both.