“Where are you, my love, what are you doing? Not having you here makes my head spin, I can’t walk straight. Everything’s confused and muddled up. You’re too young, I hate you for being so beautiful, you’ve got your life in front of you. I can’t eat, don’t even feel thirsty. I’d give everything to have you back.”

But he doesn’t and won’t come back. The narrator, a young divorced mother of two, is abandoned  one fine summer’s day, and feels she’s been robbed of all her hopes, is facing a slow decline and the return of all her demons: an absent father, an overly present mother, a fragile sense of her identity, ready to shatter like glass.

Pulling herself together, climbing back up, loving again? A story about resilience and about love gradually evaporating, but also about a particular generation, a portrait of active, computer-savvy thirty-somethings, the turbulent and the settled. It is also unequivocally Vanessa Schneider’s most mature and most accomplished novel, taking a step towards the best that is in all of us. 

Vanessa Schneider was born in 1969 and is a journalist for M, the magazine of Le Monde. Stock has published her three previous novels, La Mère de ma mère (2009), Tâche de ne pas devenir folle (2009) and Le Pacte des vierges (2011).