A Man at a Distance
Kay is a bookseller in Fécamp, Normandy. Jonathan is American, travelling across France to write a tourist guide. He stopped in Fécamp, left a note and bank notes at Kay’s book-store. The note includes the addresses of the hotels he will stay in during his tour of France. The money is for Kay to send him books. They start a correspondence, talking about the books they like.
Do we know everything about someone who enjoys the same books? Are books a way to tell everything, even the unspoken, the most terrible secret? If you had talked about books that are indifferent to me, if I had chosen books that left you cold, would you have thought of me as if you knew everything about me? Why did I go to you with blind trust? Because I was walking on books, silent accomplices, impish elves? Because your answers would slip other volumes under my steps?
Katherine Pancol

Katherine Pancol's insights into human psychology, and particularly women, are amazingly accurate and her sense of details often shaded with wry humor. Her gift to lift people's spirits while providing great entertainment has been key to her success, inspiring many women to dare to be themselves while keeping a positive relationship with life itself. Pancol (born 1954) is a Moroccan-born French novelist. While working for “Paris-Match” and “Cosmopolitan”, she is noticed by an intuitive publisher who encourages her to begin writing. Following the success of her first novel “Moi D'abord” (“Me First”) in 1979, Pancol moves to New York City where she spends the next decade pursuing creative writing and screenwriting classes at Columbia University while producing three more novels “La Barbare” in 1981, “Scarlett, si possible” and “Les hommes cruels ne courent pas les rues”. Her novel “The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles”, published in 2006, has been a huge success in France, where it sold more than one million copies and received the Prix de Maison de la Presse, for largest distribution in France. The novel is the beginning of an extremely successful trilogy, published in Bulgaria. Katherine Pancol was also awarded “Best author 2007” by Gorodets Publishing (Moscow).