Euro Previews: ‘Emilie’s Inheritance’ Takes Deep Into A Fantastical Mystery

by Richard Bruton

A new series coming out from Euro publisher Cinebook – Emilie’s Inheritance, promising to take us through time and space…

Cinebook’s library is packed full of excellent translations of European titles, particularly French titles, so it’s always fascinating to get hold of a new series. And so it is with Florence Morgan‘s Emilie’s Inheritance.

Here’s what Cinebook’s PR has to say about it…

‘A young, penniless Frenchwoman inherits an estate in Ireland – and discovers there a slew of secrets that’ll take her beyond space and time.

‘Ireland, 1801. Two men are walking across the moors when they chance upon an unearthly mausoleum lost in the mists. 122 years later, Emilie Bertin, a cabaret singer going through difficult times, is contacted by a lawyer, who explains that she is the only heir to a man who vanished in mysterious circumstances, and now stands to inherit a castle and estate … in Ireland. Thus begins for Emilie the most fantastic of journeys.

‘Even before starting her career as an illustrator, Florence Magnin’s head was always full of fairy tales and fantastic stories. She drew book covers, card decks, roleplaying games, board games … Her universe of ghosts, sprites and unicorns lives side by side with a sort of oneiric science-fiction. In 1990 she went into comics, creating with Rodolphe L’autre Monde and Black Mary (soon to be translated by Cinebook), before venturing into solo work with Emilie’s Inheritance.’

Thus starts something that’s really rather great, a mysterious inheritance that takes Emilie from nightly performances of a somewhat dubious nature in Paris all the way to remote Ireland and the Hatcliff Estate.

But this is no simple inheritance, and there are plenty of mysterious parties with an interest in how all this should play out, shadowy types with dark motives no doubt.

Once she gets to Ireland, it’s obvious, at least to us reading this, that there’s far more going on than Emilie could ever imagine. Hatcliff himself built his estate on ill-gotten gains from a fantastical adventure, one that you know is going to ensnare Emilie as things go on. Indeed, with her dreams already full of faerie creatures, you can see Emilie is already far too deep into this particularly dangerous adventure.

Yes, it’s a book that really could only come from Europe, something historical, magical, fantastical, already packed with plenty of characters that we’ll find out more of in the remaining four volumes of this five-volume work. But there’s already enough laid out in front of me here to know that this is going to be a genuinely lovely book. And a big part of that has to come from Magnin’s artwork which, whether showing us the seedier side of Parisien nightlife, the wilds of Ireland, of the eerie world of those strange faerie worlds we only begin to glimpse here in volume 1, is a beautiful thing. Her art is lush and exotic, sensual when it needs to be, but always with a strong eye for storytelling and a real delight to read.