How does love work in a world like this, where human beings are left to their own devices and submitted to the diktats of commerce, fashion and a morality based solely on appearances? What connects two people to each other? Why does love take such a tragic, risible turn nowadays?
Magalie is a kitchen designer. Guillaume is a policeman. They are both forty. She lives with a boyfriend who cheats on her, and whom she cheats on in return. He is separated from the mother of his daughter. They meet by chance, through an unlikely family connection, then lose touch a few months later.
This moving, engrossing love story is also a novel of manners: a precise and comic portrait, steeped in irony and pathos, of a time – our own – when decorating a kitchen can be a matter of utmost importance. With her corrosive gaze, sharp wit and elegant, crystal-clear prose, familiar to the many readers of her previous work, Nadine Bismuth’s new novel is a mirror held up to ourselves and what has become of our lives in a world of which we are the makers, witnesses and crazed, pathetic protagonists.