Read the beginning of Coda: A Novel by René Belletto, translated by Alyson Waters:

"It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.

On Monday, the first of August in the year _ _ _ _ at 9:30 a.m., Anna and I arrived in front of the Parc Monceau in Paris. I was bringing my daughter to the house of her maternal grandparents, Maurice and Maureen Michelangeli.

She was to spend most of the month with them.

The Michelangelis had always taken good care of Anna, especially since the death of her mother a year and a half earlier.

I believe that, could they have done so at the time, they would have kidnapped her without hesitating for a second.

They had despised me from the start. By marrying Maria, hadn’t I stolen their only child from them, and wouldn’t they have wanted to take their revenge by stealing Anna from me?

I don’t say this lightly. I know for a fact that they suspected me of having murdered Maria; they had even gone so far as to hire a private detective to look into what I’d been doing on the night of the murder.

No, I was not with Maria (alas, I was not with her!) on that March night when a stranger followed her through the hallways of the big house in Versailles where we were living and shot her in the back several times — a thief (who stole several valuable objects), an assassin and a madman, not a trace of whom was found, ever.

Fortunately, Anna was sleeping at her grandparents’ that night.

The detective must not have uncovered anything suspicious about me. He didn’t come to see me a single time, and I never heard of him again. But I have proof he was investigating me.

As the months passed, I began to hope that the Michelangelis had put their monstrous suspicions out of mind."

René Belletto was born in France in 1945. His first book, Le Temps mort, won the Prix Jean Ray for fantasy literature, his novel Sur le terre comme au ciel won the Grand Prix for fiction, and his novel L’Enfer won the Prix Fémina. Alyson Waters teaches translation at Yale University. She has translated multiple books, including Vassilis Alexakis’s Foreign Words and Albert Cossery’s A Splendid Conspiracy.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Coda, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Coda,674734.aspx.