Germain received a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne, and taught it at the French School in Prague from 1987 to 1993. She claimed that philosophy, 'a continuous wonder' to her, was also too 'analytical', and she switched from Descartes and Heidegger to Kafka and Dostoevsky. She grew up in rural France, in an area steeped in mythology and folklore, and she admitted 'that the power of place had a huge effect on me but it was an unconscious one'. That her prose was 'related to the earth ... the soil, the peasants, the trees', was revealed in her first novel, The Book of Nights (1985), which won six literary awards. The second novel, Night of Amber (1987) continued from the first, and was followed by Days of Anger (1989). Despite this three-part structure, Germain claimed that she was 'trying only to express an obsessive image and to explain it to myself. I have no pretensions to creating a mythos. Each book begins with an image or a dream and I try to express that and give it coherence.'