Salon littéraire: Changer l'eau des fleurs

The Book

In Changer l'eau des fleurs (Fresh water for the flowers), Violette Toussaint, a 50-year-old cemetery guard, recalls her bittersweet life before ending up working at the cemetery.

Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole - local police chief - who insists on scattering the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that Julien's inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette's own difficult past. A moving, complex, surprisingly simple and poetic book.

Changer l'eau des fleurs sold more than a million copies worldwide. It has been translated into over forty languages.

The Author

Valérie Perrin is a photographer and screenwriter who works with Claude Lelouch. She grew up in Burgundy and settled in Paris in 1986. Her debut novel Les Oubliés du dimanche (Forgotten on Sunday,2015) won the Booksellers Choice Award. Her English-language debut, Changer l'eau des fleurs (Fresh water for the fowers)  won the Maison de la Presse Prize, the Paperback Readers Prize, and was  a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Summer pick in 2021. Figaro Littéraire named Perrin one of the ten best-selling authors in France in 2019. 

Where to find a copy?

French Version: 

• Changer l'eau des fleurs on Amazon, in  Paperback, Kindle or audiobook.
• Changer l'eau des fleurs on AbeBoks.
• Can be borrowed at the AFSeattle library. 

English Version:

• Fresh water for the flowers on The Seattle Public Library and Elliot Bay Book Store.