Laura Spinney
Laura Spinney appears twice on the Skomlin list in two different roles: as the translator of Derborence, and as the author of the foreword to What if the sun...
Laura Spinney is a British science journalist and novelist based in Paris. She is the author of the international bestseller Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, translated into more than twenty languages, and of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025), as well as two novels, The Doctor and The Quick. Her writing appears in National Geographic, Nature, The Economist and The Guardian.
Titles at Skomlin
What would the end of the world look like to people whose lives turn on the certainty of the seasons? When the sun fails to rise over their alpine valley, the villagers of Upper Saint-Martin must live out their final days knowing the worst.
A mountain falls down and an alpine village is frozen in its summer state. When a ghostly figure appears the villagers are terrorised. Is it a soul trapped in limbo come to make his baleful complaint? Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz sets his masterful tale of love and loss against the tectonic indifference of the high Alps.