Some stories retain their power to create suspense even when we already know how history eventually unfolded. The events that took place in Nome, an Alaskan town cut off by winter in 1925, belong to that category. Claudie Gallay has made them the setting for La promesse des chiens, which she will present at Charlemagne bookshop in La Seyne-sur-Mer on Thursday 8 October at 7 p.m. as part of the Automne en librairies programme.

The meeting will be followed by a book signing. More importantly, it offers local readers an opportunity to meet a novelist who, over roughly fifteen books, has developed a body of work in which landscapes are rarely mere scenery. Places confine and shelter her characters, shape their lives and can eventually become characters themselves.

This time, Gallay heads north.

A town cut off from the world

The story takes place in Nome, on the western coast of Alaska, in 1925. The Bering Sea freezes, winter closes around the town and travel becomes increasingly difficult. Betty, who has arrived from Seattle aboard one of the last boats, finds herself in an isolated community where everyone must settle into place before the long winter months begin.

She survives by doing cleaning work, including at an establishment run by Madame Augusta and at the local dispensary headed by Doctor Curtis.

Then several children become ill.

The possibility of a diphtheria outbreak suddenly turns geographical isolation into a deadly threat. The serum capable of treating the disease is almost a thousand kilometres away. Under such conditions, the problem is no longer simply medical: somehow the medicine must be brought to Nome while winter makes the journey extraordinarily difficult.

This is where the race — and the waiting — begin.

Dog teams set out along the trail. Those remaining in Nome can do little but hope.

Gallay builds her novel around an extraordinary historical episode without reducing it to an adventure story. The Nome serum run became famous for the mushers and sled dogs who worked in relays to carry the medicine north. La promesse des chiens, however, also turns its attention towards the people experiencing the crisis from within the community itself.

A collective adventure rather than a solitary hero

That approach echoes a recurring concern in Gallay’s fiction: what happens between people who find themselves compelled to live alongside and depend upon one another.

Gallay reached a broad readership with Les Déferlantes, published by Rouergue in 2006 and notably awarded the Prix des lectrices de Elle. Her subsequent novels, published by Rouergue and later Actes Sud, have repeatedly explored silence, old wounds, attachment to particular places and the fragile bonds connecting individuals.

Les Jardins de Torcello, published by Actes Sud in 2024, once again placed a strongly defined landscape at the centre of the narrative. La promesse des chiens moves to a radically different latitude while retaining that concern with environment and community.

Nome’s winter is therefore more than dramatic scenery. It determines how the characters must live: with limited resources, with uncertainty and, above all, with dependence on other people.

That may be what gives the historical episode a particular resonance today. Behind the physical achievement of the sled teams lies a system based on relays. For the serum to reach its destination, each participant must complete one section of the journey before passing responsibility to someone else.

The idea of a single hero gives way to a chain of people and animals.

A literary meeting in La Seyne

Claudie Gallay’s appearance in La Seyne-sur-Mer is part of Automne en librairies, an event organised by Les Libraires du Sud across a number of bookshops in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

For readers in the Toulon metropolitan area, the evening offers an opportunity to meet a writer whose work has occupied a firm place in contemporary French fiction for the past two decades. It also raises an interesting literary question: how does a novelist transform a real event into fiction?

How can an author write a story whose broad outlines already belong to history? Where can fictional characters be placed when reality has already provided such an extraordinary narrative? And how can the spectacular elements of the story avoid overshadowing ordinary lives?

La promesse des chiens appears to occupy precisely that space: between historical fact and fiction, between collective achievement and individual lives, between physical survival and the bonds that allow a community to endure.

Claudie Gallay will appear on Thursday 8 October 2026 at 7 p.m. at Librairie Charlemagne, 27 quai Gabriel-Péri, La Seyne-sur-Mer.