Jeffrey Ford (La Fille dans le verre) va sortir dans quelques jours un nouveau roman : The Shadow Year.

Il est en interview sur le net, très exactement ici

Petit extrait :
"What I'm impressed with in your novels is that they're distinctively different from each other: The Well-Built City trilogy is very different from The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass. Is The Shadow Year such another departure from your previous novels? Was it conscious on your part?

I suppose it’s a departure – the writing style is different and it has more elements of fictionalized autobiography in it than the others, which have none. To an extent the decision is conscious in that I’m aware that I don’t want to write the same book again and again. The minute I decide to write a novel, though, with the exception of some of the research I do, which on this one was not extensive, the “subconscious” takes over in that the style of the book is dictated by the story and its characters. My method of writing is to follow the characters. I plot nothing in advance, but envision the characters in my mind and follow them, see what they do and record it. Eventually, the style becomes evident to me, I’m conscious of it, and I have it in mind when I edit. I think the styles in my various short stories are quite diverse also, and I think this is because I more come to them, discover them, than consciously build them. It’s as if they already exist, and I’m merely accessing them. In other words, I don’t know. "



En attendant une éventuelle traduction, voici le résumé du livre en anglais :
"In the center of New York’s Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister, Mary, who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them, as all boys do. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family’s modest home, where he and brother, Jim, have created “Botch Town,” an extraordinarily detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay and wire figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not always reassuring sameness--until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.

Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police by unmasking the unknown Peeping Tom--while their little sister smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas… and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves the inanimate residents of Botch Town around. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys’ night games: unexplainable disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings, capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long, white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in their basement."