Skip content
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch
Victorine by Catherine Texier
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Victorine

$17.95

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Josephine Bailey
Length 11 hours 3 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

In this lush, lyrical, and marvelously evocative novel, Catherine Texier takes a mystery from her family’s past and draws from it a portrait of a remarkable woman—her great-grandmother Victorine. A young schoolteacher in a quiet province in France, Victorine had married and had two children. But when she falls desperately in love, she makes a startling choice, leaving her family for her lover and a new life in Indochina.

On a single day in 1940, as Victorine reflects on her past, we travel back with her, from the willow-lined canals of her childhood home in Vendée to sun-drenched days and languorous nights along the Mekong River at the dawn of the twentieth century. Hers is an unforgettable story of adventure and self-discovery—of a woman’s struggle between duty and independence, tradition and freedom, longing and regret.

Catherine Texier is the author of four novels, Chloé l’Atlantique, Love Me Tender, Panic Blood, and Victorine, and a memoir, Breakup. She was the coeditor of the literary magazine Between C & D, is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and has written for NewsdayElleHarper’s BazaarCosmopolitanMarie Claire, and Nerve. Texier lives in New York City.

Josephine Bailey, a native of London, is a seasoned performer who has won ten AudioFile Earphones Awards and a prestigious Audie Award. Publishers Weekly named her Best Female Narrator in 2002. She has narrated the audiobooks Jane Eyre, Year of Wonders, and A Great and Terrible Beauty, among many others.

Catherine Texier is the author of four novels, Chloé l’Atlantique, Love Me Tender, Panic Blood, and Victorine, and a memoir, Breakup. She was the coeditor of the literary magazine Between C & D, is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and has written for NewsdayElleHarper’s BazaarCosmopolitanMarie Claire, and Nerve. Texier lives in New York City.

Josephine Bailey, a native of London, is a seasoned performer who has won ten AudioFile Earphones Awards and a prestigious Audie Award. Publishers Weekly named her Best Female Narrator in 2002. She has narrated the audiobooks Jane Eyre, Year of Wonders, and A Great and Terrible Beauty, among many others.

Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Reviews

"Female sexuality--the driving force of Texier's abrasive earlier fiction (e.g., Love Me Tender, 1987; Panic Blood, 1990)--takes a much more romantic form here. Billed as a mixture of fact and fiction and based on the little Texier knew about her eponymous great-grandmother, it's the story of a grand amour and its bittersweet aftermath. The narrative juxtaposes a day in 1940 when the elderly Victorine, living in France under German occupation, goes to the beach with her middle-aged youngest son--with Victorine's staggered memories of her youth, marriage, adultery, and repentance. The latter are revealed in gorgeously written extended flashbacks in which we observe, in the early pages, a young girl who is "good at pretending" growing up in provincial Vendée, briefly encountering handsome teenaged Antoine Langelot, then entering an increasingly unhappy marriage to worldly--and rather officiously masculine--schoolteacher Armand Texier. Victorine bears Armand two children, but dreams of a different, more exotic life. And when Antoine reenters hers and importunes her to travel with him to employment opportunities in Indochina, she vacillates nervously, then, in 1899, leaves her family and joins him. Texier shapes Victorine's Indochina adventure as a series of disillusionments: Antoine's repeated business failures, his slow fall into an expatriate culture absorbed in the pursuit of luxury and the consolations of opium, the "message" implicit in a text she uses to study native languages ("The Tale of Kieu," a narrative poem about a woman who gave up everything to be with her lover), and Victorine's own burgeoning guilt and unhappiness. The close comes with her sorrowful (though resolute) parting from Antoine and her return to Vendée, and Armand. Echoes of both Madame Bovary and Kate Chopin's The Awakening suffuse a nevertheless inventive and artfully composed delineation of a beguiling and complicated woman's arduous journey toward self-understanding. A subtly textured fourth novel: Texier's best yet."
--Kirkus Reviews (February 1, 2004)

"Texier based this mesmerizing novel on the family legends surrounding her great-grandmother, Victorine, who left her husband for a year in 1899. At 16, Victorine was the youngest schoolteacher in all of France, but her father’s dreams for her are dashed when she meets Armand Texier and becomes pregnant at 17. The couple marries hastily and settles into a life in Vendée with their two children. But Victorine is never completely satisfied, and when handsome Antoine, a man she loved as a girl, reenters her life, he ignites a deep passion in Victorine. When he tells her he is going to Indochina, he asks her to go with him. She does, and she travels to a world where she is able to reinvent herself. But Victorine has never been a woman to fall easily into any one role, and she finds herself as out of place in Indochina as she thought she was in Vendée. With lush, vivid description, Texier brings to life both the world around Victorine and the woman herself."
--Kristine Huntley, Booklist (February 15, 2004)

“Elegant as a pair of satin gloves, Victorine is the enchanting narrative of a unique woman. By reimagining the missing years in a family mystery, Texier has created a captivating novel of desire, longing, and betrayal. This is a seductive work
of art.”
——Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Crescent

“A lovely and original novel that transported me to another time and place. A tantalizing mix of fact and fantasy: the author inhabits her great-grandmother’s soul.”
——Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangments and Dreams of Rescue

“Catherine Texier’s Victorine is a provocative yet generous meditation on the effects of her great-grandmother’s reckless choice of passion over duty as it ripples through time and generations. Every family has its mysteries and intrigues, but few are this dramatic, and even fewer have been the inspiration for such a vivid and graceful novel.”
——Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson and The Little Women

“I was so impressed by Victorine. Yes, it’s love again, but such a candid view of it and in such an original voice. It’s a haunting and remarkable read.”
——Joanna Trollope, author of Other People’s Children

“In Victorine, Texier susses a family secret using all the tools of a dauntless novelist. A surprising and stunning book.” ——Patricia Volk, author of Stuffed

“A marvelous achievement, a historical novel that reads less like an invention than like a discovery, a love story that has sprung to life of its own accord from an old trunk. Victorine takes the reader into a world that is unquestionably real and explores with equal assurance the lost accents of a foreign time and place, and the intractable mysteries of the heart.” ——Paul LaFarge, author of Haussmann, or the Distinction Expand reviews
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch