Petite Mort

Starred review from January 2, 2012
In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling months. Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her husband, Strayed was still reeling from the sudden death four years before of her mother from cancer; the ensuing years formed an erratic, confused time “like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler.” Hiking the trail helped decide what direction her life would take, even though she had never seriously hiked or carried a pack before. Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour. Eventually she began to experience “a kind of strange, abstract, retrospective fun,” meeting the few other hikers along the way, all male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning books she had read; and encountering all manner of creature and acts of nature from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
First published in the U.K. in 2013 and adapted as a BBC Radio 4 serial starring Honor Blackman, Hitchman’s dazzling debut, a thriller that spans seven decades, offers insights into early Parisian film making and the amoral glitterati who brought it to dizzying life. Adèle Roux starred in Petite Mort, a 1914 silent film that was believed destroyed in a fire at the Pathé factory before it could be distributed. Adèle’s involvement in a murder case later that year ensured that the film was not reshot. Provocative snippets of the actress’s titillating memoirs, told in her old age to journalist Juliette Blanc, chronicle her passionate affairs with seductive special-effects inventor André Durand and his ravishing and sinister actress wife, Luce. The memoir’s chilling glimpses of the leading characters’ precociously lethal early lives counterpoint the 1967 rediscovery of the lost film—with one crucial scene missing. Hitchman juxtaposes love and lust, unquenchable desire and pangs of self-revulsion, in this scorching exposé of ambition so ferocious it drives souls into hells of their own making.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
For the title of her first novel, film writer and director Hitchman chose the French expression for sexual climax, a little death, which she also uses as the title of a famous film from France's Path' Studio. This legendary film is the focus of an archivist's scholarly quest as she searches for missing frames artfully concealed in footage surviving a 1914 studio fire. Her search leads her to a poor seamstress. She becomes a director's mistress, taken into his home for more convenient trysts and employed as a personal assistant to his famously gorgeous movie-star wife. The two women fall passionately in love while concealing crucial secrets. Readers preferring fast-paced action right from the start should not be put off by this novel's initially measured pace, because the shifts in time and points of view pay off in this tour-de-force thriller about romance and betrayal. Hitchman's magnetic mystery is told so evocatively, such as when the young seamstress yearns to leave with her beloved: Alone with her on the drive, all her ghosts streaming out ahead of us, evaporating on the morning air. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)