I read the news as I would have read a line from any one of her novels: L.L. ‘had left at daybreak … A storm had broken out overnight and a warm downpour battered the flowers in the garden, which bent low, their faces to the ground. The rain leaked through the roof, dripped on the table, formed a puddle in the middle of the anthology that for days had been open to the same page. I shall go by the forest, I shall go by the mountain’ (Les trois Parques). Linda Lê, the headlines read, had died following a long illness. Like the colleagues I would reach out to in the days after learning of her death, I had not even known she was ill. Lê, the image of diffidence until the very end, retreated into the shadows as quietly and as humbly as she had entered the French literary scene more than thirty years ago.

• Tags: France, Issue 28, Leslie Barnes, Linda Lê, Vietnam