The author of fourteen novels and short story books,Anne Serre was born in 1960. Her work has been acclaimed here as hypnotic, enchanting" ( Publishers Weekly ), "tight and fabulist" ( Full Stop ), and "strange and beguiling" ( Kirkus ).
Mark Hutchinson was born in London in 1957 and lives in Paris. Among his many translations are Rene Char's Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems ."

Genuinely original—and, often, very quietly so. Prim and racy, seriously weird and seriously excellent, The Governesses is not a treatise but an aria, and one delivered with perfect pitch. - Parul Seghal

Hypnotic, enchanting.

Strange, beguiling: a jewel.

[A] wry, unconventional novel about a woman's desire.

Her books that have been translated into English—The Governesses, The Fool and Other Moral Tales and The Beginners—have a glamour in the older sense of the word, that of witchcraft. These are books that, in their concern with the properties of fiction—plots, narrator, genre, characters—use these very elements to beguile. - Rhian Sasseen

The Beginners is as much a celebration of the dizzying excesses of female desire as Serre’s other work. Even in comparatively realist mode, Serre is a seductress. - Becca Rothfeld