Exile and troubled motherhood are two closely intertwined themes thatdominate Nancy Huston’sœuvre. Every collection of Huston’s non-fiction writingscontains at least one essay reflecting on the link between her mother’s departurefrom the family home in childhood and her own exile, and her novels are equallypreoccupied with such themes. The protagonist of the novelLa Virevolte, a motherof two, is caught in an agonizingly painful conflict between family life and aninternational career as a dancer, and shefinally opts for leaving the former for thesake of the latter. The novelL’Empreinte de l’angefeatures the story of a femaleGerman character who relocates to France at the end of the 1950s, where shemarries a Frenchflautist and becomes a mother shortly after that. Her love affairwith a Hungarian instrument maker of Jewish origin draws her into a double life thathas fatal consequences for her son