Double Room – Anne Sénès | Blog Tour Extract | Translated by #AliceBanks | #DoubleRoom | #AnneSenes @OrendaBooks @RandomTTours

When his life falls apart after a horrific tragedy, a composer returns to his native France, where he creates an AI machine with his dead wife’s voice, with unexpected, devastating consequences…

London, late 1990s. Stan, a young and promising French composer, is invited to arrange the music for a theatrical adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The play will never be staged, but Stan meets Liv, the love of his life, and their harmonious duo soon becomes a trio with the birth of their beloved daughter, Lisa. Stan’s world is filled with vibrant colour and melodic music, and under his wife and daughter’s gaze, his piano comes to life.

Paris, today. After Liv’s fatal accident, Stan returns to France surrounded by darkness, no longer able to compose, and living in the Rabbit Hole, a home left to him by an aunt. He shares his life with Babette, a lifeguard and mother of a boy of Lisa’s age, and Laïvely, an AI machine of his own invention endowed with Liv’s voice, that he spent entire nights building after her death.

But Stan remains haunted by his past. As the silence gradually gives way to noises, whistles and sighs – sometimes even bursts of laughter – and Laïvely seems to take on a life of its own, memories and reality fade and blur…

And Stan’s new family implodes…

For readers who love Laura Kasischke, David Nicholls and Kazuo Ishiguro

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the tour invite and to the publisher for providing the extract. Double Room by Anne Sénès and translated by Alice Banks, is published by Orenda Books (19 June 2025) in ebook, audiobook and paperback formats.

EXTRACT

London

TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

It was her laughter I discovered first. A tinkling tune with yellowed edges and a touch of taupe at the seams. Something I had never heard, never felt before.

Only her back was visible. She was leaning over the actor who was playing Dorian Gray so she could touch up his make-up, a palette of foundation in her hand. A palette that, musically, would have been a cascade of bells, the sound only slightly more high pitched than her laughter.

I stopped at the last row of seats in the room and waited for her to straighten up. She was wearing a short skirt, black. A midnight-blue T-shirt hugged the curve of her back. No bra. Leather sandals with a worn strap. A mass of red hair, precariously held back by a hairdresser’s clip that seemed exhausted by the effort of taming the strands that were waiting to escape its scrutiny and fly off in all directions.

I saw all of this, and a lot more. The lines that her arms traced, the stroke of her wrist as she moved a little brush across the actor’s cheeks; he, eyes closed, surrendered to her. I saw the crease of her knee and a vein, so blue it was green, snaking up the length of her leg before disappearing under the hem of her skirt.

I saw a mark left behind by a mosquito beneath her right elbow and smudges of freckles all over her skin.

I saw…

The theatre was a little grimy and gave off the smell of dust and sweat. The upholstered seats had seen better days. The lighting was concentrated on the stage, where designers bustled about, along with two or three other guys whose roles in this strange ballet, now in its first rehearsal, I was unsure of.

I saw the garnet-red velour divan that the actor was stretched across. A lamp with a fringed shade, its light too bright. A portrait turned to face the wall.

The voices of two or three others reached me, although I didn’t understand what they were talking about. Their intonation was different to what I was used to in the small Parisian venues where I had first performed.

In the duration of a minim, I had forgotten that I was in London, that this was my first truly serious job. For me, life had begun in that exact place, at that very moment.

Anne Sénès was born in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, where she obtained a PhD in English studies. Her passion for Anglo-Saxon literature and culture has taken her all over the world, from London to Miami, passing through the south of France. She is currently based on the Mediterranean coast, where she works as a journalist and translator. Chambre Double (Double Room) is her first literary novel.

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