Alice Dumas Kol was born in New York in 1989 and grew up in Paris. She exercises her profession as a psychoanalyst there after having worked for the ballet Preljocaj for several years. “Bitter luckis his first novel.
“Locked up between the four walls of her one-bedroom apartment in Créteil, Lok Yé watches a Khmer musical tape, a love story in rose water. Her granddaughter, Alice, visits her after school. She settles down on a plastic stool with a piece of pandan cake and observes this silent little grandmother. She sees her slumped shoulders, her puckering body, giving her the appearance of a creamy ball. But she does not yet perceive the domestic violence.
Years later, she feels the need to immerse herself in the family story to question the women who were her grandmother and her mother, prisoners of a past traumatized by forced exile. Arrived in France in 1975, after having fled Cambodia, they will always keep in their bodies the memory of the war and will transmit it to the following generations. In Une chance amere, Alice Dumas Kol gives flesh to these phantom women, lifts the veil on their battered silence and their inner struggles to rise despite uprooting and misery. Far from stereotypes and prejudices, the author offers us a true photograph of the tormented psychology of these South Asian refugees who have chosen France as a land of refuge.” (Presentation of Anne Carriere editions)