Mauve Desert

First we read as fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother's lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the book's second part Maude Laures reads Mauve Desert, this story of Mélanie, and becomes obsessed with it. Finally, 'Mauve, the Horizon', offers Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert, and like all good translations, it is both the same and enticingly different from the original.