Antibes Winter, (Paperback)

<p><em>"There is a specific kind of silence that a person who has spent eighteen months on a boat does not, at first, know what to do with."</em></p><p></p><p>May and June 2022. Anouk de Smet is twenty-two. M/Y <em>Aerope</em> is in dry-dock at La Ciotat. The Caribbean season is behind her. She has rented a small studio above the Boulangerie Tordo on the rue Sade in Antibes - three windows, a single small kitchen, a bed on a mezzanine - and she has six weeks to write her MA dissertation and to find out who she is when she is not, in fact, on a boat.</p><p></p><p>She meets Théo Marchand on the evening of the thirteenth of May, at a bar on the Place Nationale, where she is not looking for anyone - which is, she would come to understand, the only state in which one ever meets anyone. Théo is thirty-one, French, an architect, divorced (no kids, one cat named Pim), and is renting a flat on the rue du Bas Castelet. He cooks her dinner on the nineteenth. She does not, on the way to his flat, tell anyone where she is going.</p><p></p><p>Over six weeks, between supervisor Zoom calls with Professor Vermeulen in Ghent, and four-in-the-morning conversations with the boulanger Karim Boumaza about his daughters and his wife, and a long weekend in Antibes with her mother Marleen, and a phone call from her fifteen-year-old sister Anneke who has been crying about a boy, Anouk writes seventy thousand words of a dissertation she is not, yet, sure is any good.</p><p></p><p>And then, on the seventeenth of June, the email from the <em>Halcyon</em> comes - a 55-metre sail-assisted yacht in Greece, Greek-owned, a senior stewardess slot, her own section - and the email turns a feeling into a decision with a deadline, which is the only kind of decision that is real.</p><p></p><p><em>Antibes Winter</em> is the third volume of <strong>The Yacht Chronicles</strong>. The final volume of the first trilogy. A small precise particular Antibes spring, a French dinner, a Belgian wedding, a Marseille train ticket, a Halcyon email, a green dress that stays, for the moment, in reserve.</p><p></p><p>Set in Antibes, La Ciotat, Marseille, Ghent, Berchem, and the small in-between of a life lived between boats.</p><p></p><p><strong>Names, vessels, charters, and identifying details have been changed throughout these pages, for reasons of professional discretion. Any reader who believes they have recognised a specific real person, vessel, or charter is, in the author's judgement, mistaken.</strong></p>

• Antibes Winter, (Paperback)
• Author: Vista Editions
• ISBN: 9783991911210
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-05-01
• Page Count: 148