“I see my little companions from when I was eight years old, in bright white sheets, with their smiles, their lower eyelids; their gaze has slipped away. We shared our beds with them. In prisons too, the prisoners don’t forget their cellmates. They are faces that both fed and devoured our brains, our eyes. There is no time, at that time. Childhood is ancient.”

Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline , originally written in Italian, was her first novel to be translated into English. Translator Tim Parks discovered the book by accident while browsing at a bookstore in Italy. Since then, Jaeggy’s slim novels have received critical acclaim and enjoyed popularity with readers.

Like a harem

Set in a boarding school in post-war Switzerland, a 14-year-old Eve, the novel’s

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