Promises
“I hope I've renounced all the promises I made to myself as a child. Becoming a man means rethinking your flight plan. To realize that one constantly deceives oneself by imagining what life will be like."
Alexander, called Sandro, is the only child of Vittorio, the descendant of a rich Italian family, and a French woman of humble origin. After every radiant summer spent in the opulent Italian estate, comes a dreary winter in the dreary Paris apartment. A wonderful childhood full of promises of happy days to come, but Sandro is only ten years old when his life turns upside down. The man he is about to become will go through innumerable doubts, hesitations, fleeting pleasures, sorrows and escapes, doomed to ceaselessly be at odds with himself, and with the great love that illuminated his entire being.
"Promises" is a novel revising an apparently full life, but completely marked by a split between two homelands, two languages, two names and two essences of the main character, which he never manages to combine and reconcile. He remains doomed to disappointments and regrets, too obsessed with tomorrow. That is why he can't feel the beauty of today.
The novel has been determined by critics as one of the most successful works of Amanda Sthers.
Amanda Sthers
Amanda Queffélec-Maruani (born 18 April 1978), known professionally as Amanda Sthers, is a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker. Sthers is of Tunisian Sefardi and Breton origins.
She has written ten novels which have been translated in more than 14 countries. She wrote film scripts based on several of her books and directed the film adaptations herself.
Her first play, "Le Vieux Juif blonde" is today studied at Harvard University.
Sthers moved to Los Angeles with her two children in 2017 where she started a film production company.
