Rights sold to Diogenes (Germany), Santorski (Poland), JakkaJungsin (Korea), Salani (Italy), Baltos Lankos (Lithuania), and Mladinska Knjiga Zalozba (Slovénia)
Sample Translation Available
This is the story of helpful, amenable Benjamin, a pharmacist, and beautiful, brilliant Béatrice, a writer of children’s books. He has spent his life acquiescing to other people’s ideas of him. She has always gone straight after what she wants, impatient or disdainful with anyone who won’t do the same.
The light of Benjamin’s life is his little daughter Marion. To Béatrice, she’s more a property—the ideal test reader for her work. It’s not that his wife is too good for him, as everyone around him seems to think. It’s that, Benjamin realizes, she’s not right for him at all.
This is a frank tale of the power struggles at the heart of couplehood. Béatrice is a despot of daily life. She insists that talking resolves all problems, and promptly does all the talking herself; from a superiority blessed by both brains and beauty she dispenses advice and veiled threats; she believes herself a master of the bedroom arts and a martyr to an unimaginative man.
When Benjamin, incited to rebellion by reading Plutarch, takes a mistress, Béatrice offers him an ultimatum: stay, and be with Marion, or leave and lose his daughter.
Isabelle Minière is at the height of her powers in this account of a man’s awakening to his own wants and needs from a lifetime of following the path of least resistance.