Claire Delaunay Trilogy
You are about to enter a trilogy written under the pseudonym Claire Delaunay.
Although these novels were written alongside my other literary work, they belong to a distinct imaginative world and a different poetics. For that reason, I chose to publish them under another name.
This page serves as an introduction to the entire project: the novels, characters, cities, illustrations, and accompanying materials.
The novels will be published gradually, approximately one month apart:
- PASSAGE
- BETWEEN
- SECOND LIFE
This site is conceived as an open archive of a trilogy in progress — a place where texts, images, spaces, and characters meet before becoming books.
THE TRILOGY
PASSAGE, BETWEEN, and SECOND LIFE follow Sophie de Montreuil through three turbulent periods of her life. At the same time, the trilogy tells the story of a woman’s identity shaped by circumstances, events, love, and life in different cities, while never ceasing to search for a way to remain true to her convictions.
In PASSAGE, the disappearance of a guest from Room 601 reveals a network of hidden passages and secrets within a luxury hotel in Marseille. While the police search for the missing woman, Betty (the false identity used by Sophie) begins to notice traces and anomalies that no one else can see.
In BETWEEN, investigation gives way to love. Caught between Julien, an art professor who has known Sophie since childhood although she does not remember him, and Flobjan, a floral designer who understands the world through details and the connections between them, Sophie struggles to find her place in a life that no longer feels entirely secure.
In SECOND LIFE, the past returns in a new form. Although she lives and works contentedly in Lyon, Sophie begins an unusual love affair in Grenoble — one she has, in a sense, already left behind.
Although each novel tells its own story — from a hotel mystery, through a love story, to a tale of a new beginning — all three are connected by the same question: How many times can a person change the way they live and still remain true to themselves?
CHARACTERS
THE PASSAGE
At the center of the first novel, PASSAGE, is Betty, a hotel maid who, under a false identity, conceals the life of Sophie de Montreuil, a former art curator.
The disappearance of a guest from Room 601 sets off an investigation that uncovers a network of hidden passages, interconnected spaces, and anomalies that can no longer be explained by procedure alone.
While the police search for the missing woman, Betty is drawn deeper and deeper into the secrets of the hotel and its hidden passages. She is aided by Flobjan, a floral designer who notices what others fail to see.
The hotel becomes a model of the contemporary world: the more perfect the system of surveillance, the more visible its cracks become.
PASSAGE is at once a hotel mystery, a psychological thriller, and a story about identity, absence, and the limits of perception.
BETWEEN
The second novel, BETWEEN, shifts the focus from space to human relationships.
In Marseille, a city of passages and encounters, Sophie tries to find a new place for herself in a world that no longer seems entirely reliable.
Between Julien, a professor who represents order, culture, and understanding, and Flobjan, a man who experiences reality through intuition and subtle deviations, a love triangle emerges and gradually becomes a question of identity.
What appeared in PASSAGE as a disturbance of space now manifests itself through emotions, memories, and intimacy. Sophie is no longer certain where her previous life ends and a new one begins.
BETWEEN is a sensual and melancholic novel about a love that brings not security but change; about choosing between different possibilities of life; and about the question of who we become when we truly fall in love.
SECOND LIFE
The third novel, SECOND LIFE, returns Sophie, Julien, and Flobjan to a world in which the boundary between a former life and a new one is no longer clear.
Although she lives and works in Lyon, Sophie begins an unusual love affair in Grenoble, one that unfolds each time in a different hotel in the city.
SECOND LIFE is the most intimate and melancholic part of the trilogy — a love story about fidelity and betrayal at the same time.
It brings to a close the story of a woman’s identity across three successive periods of her life and asks whether it is possible to change one’s life many times and still remain faithful to oneself.
The novel BETWEEN, and later the entire trilogy, grew out of my long-standing fascination with the profession of the hotel maid.
She may be the only person who, by virtue of her work, enters other people’s lives while they are absent.
Objects, books, clothing, and small traces of everyday life become, for the heroine, a way of understanding relationships, characters, and the hidden stories of people she has never met.
Large hotels are, in a sense, states unto themselves — modern descendants of feudal castles, with their own rules, hierarchies, and ways of functioning.
About the Author
Claire Delaunay(born in Aix-en-Provence, 1974)
Claire Delaunay (a pseudonym of Jasmina Mihajlović) is a French literary critic and essayist whose work lies at the intersection of contemporary European fiction, visual culture, and the philosophy of space. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, where she focused on the relationship between text, architecture, and perception.
In her early work, she explored the ways in which space shapes narrative, particularly in the writings of Georges Perec and Patrick Modiano. She later developed an interest in contemporary novels in which objects, spatial arrangements, and absence become carriers of meaning.
She is a regular contributor to Le Monde des Livres and La Nouvelle Revue Française, where she publishes essays on literature that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Her particular field of interest is what she calls the “quiet novel” — works in which tension emerges through subtle shifts rather than dramatic events.
The novel Passage marks her transition from literary criticism to fiction. In it, she develops the theme of parallel existence within a single life, without rupture and without definitive choice, through meticulously crafted urban spaces, hotels, and transitional places.
Claire Delaunay is the pseudonym of an author whose identity is intentionally inseparable from that of her heroines. She writes about women who do not choose between their lives, but carry them simultaneously.
She lives between Paris and Marseille. Her writing is distinguished by its restrained, precise style and by its insistence that what remains unspoken often carries the deepest meaning.
