Nathalie Sarraute is one of contemporary France's most important writers. In autumn 1987, at the age of eighty-seven, she was in the process of finishing her eleventh novel. The first ten have been translated into twenty-three foreign languages, including Egyptian. These books are generally designated by the term nouveaux romans, and, indeed, Sarraute is recognized as an initiator and one of the prime theorists of the literary current that, over the last thirty years, has decisively oriented the course of narrative fiction.

Nathalie Sarraute was born 18 July 1900 in Ivanovo-Voznessensk, Russia. Her father, Ilya Tcherniak, was a chemist; her mother, Pauline Chatounovsky Tcherniak, a writer. Her parents divorced when she was two. She lived with her mother and stepfather in Paris until age five, spending her summers at her father's home in Russia. Then her mother returned to Saint Petersburg, and Sarraute followed her, still spending her summers with her...