A specialist in imaginary tales, Aurélie Wellenstein has been writing for over 10 years with a fondness for themes related to nature, the animal world, and magic with an obvious dreamlike quality. Published last May by Fleuve Éditions, The Girl of Fire is an initiatory tale driven by a child consumed by fire.
Blaze in the Heart of the Canadian Great North
Mia is Australian, yet it is in the Canadian Great North that she desperately wanders. She has lost everything: her home, her friends, her country, her family, and most recently, her mother. Hunted for her inner fire, she no longer knows where to go in this hostile, icy territory.
Not far away, Nathanaël has just arrived in Ilussuaq, a small Inuit village, where he hopes to record the local oral traditions that are threatened with disappearance. Animal tattoos cover his body, marked by burns.
Cadzow will be his guide in this land, a stoic Inuit who wants to preserve the ancestral culture of his people. But he too is haunted by a terrible incandescence. And when he shoots a hungry bear threatening the village, the collision of these three destinies is inevitable.
After being published for a long time by Scrineo, Aurélie Wellenstein arrives at Fleuve in 2024 with The Harpist of the Red Lands and publishes this year The Girl of Fire. At the heart of her new tale are the flames. At the very start, the violent fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020, with their harrowing images of koalas with scorched fur or opossums with charred paws, which went around the world.
A real event as the starting point for Mia and her mother’s forced exile, with her mother determined to save her. Thus, they find themselves more than 10,000 kilometers from their home, and the fate of the three protagonists will change forever.
Three Forests, Three Heroes with Fragile Pasts
Each carries within their body and soul, a burned forest. The bush for Mia. A southern French forest for Nathanaël and the boreal forests of the Great North for Cadzow. And their paths will clash due to the madness of one man.
Aurélie Wellenstein describes each of them with strength and precision, their psychology evolving, molding with the narrative, transforming through the trial. The relationship between Nathanaël and Mia is particularly touching, especially the personal journey of the young man, the most deeply rooted trauma of the three, the most vivid despite the years, and undoubtedly, the one who suffers the most.
The dreamlike quality at the beginning, the fantastic elements introduced by Aurélie Wellenstein gradually transform into a thriller with a chase across the Canadian wilderness, still untamed. Using this wilderness as a healing balm, the author makes her heroes’ intimate dramas confront the climatic events our world is currently experiencing. With a descriptive and enchanting pen, Aurélie Wellenstein offers a three-voice narrative to address unresolved traumas, the loss of bearings when a natural disaster occurs, the concerns of a part of humanity about ecology and climate change. Through the use of the fantastic, Aurélie Wellenstein turns these into supernatural forces to (re)kindle hope.
