Three women and a baby: this could be a comedy  but it isn’t. When the narrator, Anita, gives birth to a baby boy, everyone is delighted. Not her. Crippling anxieties, sleepless nights, hallucinations… the present disappears and the past resurfaces. What can have caused this distress? What tortured childhood? What forgotten exile brought back to life? Anita really does have the “baby blues”, and she leaves her husband and baby. She runs away south towards the warmth of Marseille, the city that played host to a family psychodrama. Anita tries to work out where she fits in with her mother, the ever-present egocentric Rosie, and her grandmother, the seductive alcoholic Odette.

Being a wife and mother. Loving and loathing. Remembering and forgetting. Illuminating the secrets that constitute an identity. In this sensitive yet violent novel as tender as a child’s heartbreak, Olivia Elkaim paints a portrait of three women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Olivia Elkaim was born in 1976. She is a journalist and novelist, author of Les Graffitis de Chambord (2008) and Les Oiseaux noirs de Massada (2011), published by Grasset.