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Starred review from February 1, 2025
A gripping novel about grief and loss. In her autobiographical novel, Giraud chronicles the mundane events leading up to her husband Claude's accidental death 20 years ago. One afternoon, as he's running a series of errands, he crashes a borrowed Honda CBR900 Fireblade motorcycle. Though it's a tragedy of chance and circumstance, Giraud tortures herself, wondering if there's something she did to contribute to this fateful accident. In elegant but straightforward prose, Giraud's narrator asks a series of unanswerable questions: Why did he ride that particular motorcycle? Why did he need to make a detour? What could she have done so that he might still be alive? "I'm writing from this remote setting where I've landed," Giraud begins, "and from which I perceive the world as a slightly blurry film that for a long time has been shot without me." Though the narrator pores over each and every action her husband took, as if examining a film strip, existing in the past offers no answers. Rather, all the what ifs have "made [her] live [her] life in the past conditional." "It's like trying to wring out a dry cloth," she writes with bemusement. "And yet." Though we get tidbits of their marriage and work, Giraud is more interested in parsing the day of Claude's death, not in scenes they shared while he was still alive. Ultimately, Giraud understands that "there's no chronological or methodological order to any series of events" even as she tries to make sense of this random tragedy. Written with forensic precision and journalistic detail, Giraud's elegiac novel is about the questions that haunt us no matter how much we may try to rid ourselves of them. An exhaustive inquiry into an irrevocable loss.

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February 1, 2025
Winner of France's Prix Goncourt, Giraud's first novel to be translated into English is based on the author's sudden loss of her husband in a motorcycle accident. On the precipice of selling the home she bought decades ago with her husband, though he died too soon to live in it, the narrator takes "one last look around the whole thing," not just the house but everything that happened. She tells the story of her relationship with Claude, their transition to becoming parents, the homes they shared, and the mysterious series of events that led to the accident. Chapters are titled with 23 if only's--"If only my grandfather hadn't committed suicide" (thus leaving a sum of money the couple used to buy their first apartment), "if only my brother hadn't had a garage issue" (leading him to park his extra-dangerous bike in theirs). It's literary bargaining par excellence. Even knowing the crushing truth, we read fast, hoping the narrator can identify precisely which butterfly's wing to catch in midair and change her whole story.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.