Translated by Peter Green 'This is terrifying vision of existence is conveyed with intense poetic power' Guardian François Besson listens to a tape recording of a girl contemplating suicide. Drifting through the days in a provincial city, he thoughtlessly starts a fire in his apartment, attends confession, and examines, with great intentness but without affection, a naked woman he wakes beside. And, as Besson moves through an ugly and threatening rain, his thoughts eventually lead to violence, first turned outward and then directed languidly against himself. 'His distinctive talent is everywhere evident, so that in Peter Green's admirable translation many individual scenes have a horrific hallucinatory power' Sunday Times Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature