When tragedy strikes and Theodore Lebon is robbed of his adored wife, or rather, his wife's head, for it is only her headless body that returns home after a riding accident, we are once again in that strange world that Sylvie Germain has made her own. It is a world where certainties dissolve and the confines of reality shift to embrace the unexpected and the improbable, the absurd, the grotesque, even the miraculous. Nothing is too weird or wonderful to find a place in her richly imaginative fiction.

to modern day rural France.

Germain is the author of none works of fiction, a study of the painter Vermeer, and religious meditation. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and has received worldwide acclaim.