Who are these insolent people who earned the author the very last Renaudot prize? Three Parisians who have experienced terrible things, but who nevertheless continue to live with their dark side and move forward as best they can.

At the center of their trio, which risks no longer being one, there is Alex, a 45-year-old musician who decides to leave her small apartment in the Marais to move to a house near the sea, in Brittany. A departure that she decides to consider as an exile rather than the start of another life.

At her age, she only knows people who are alone or “who inflict aberrant stories on themselves to no longer be alone.” And it is precisely this reflection that is the basis of her decision: “When you feel alone among others, you might as well be alone for good,” she says to herself. In her love life made up of “uninteresting” nights, most often in the company of women significantly younger than her, Alex ended up choosing solitude and it is this feeling that she embraces without fear as she settles into his new life.

“Why, to change, you always have to die a little inside. Why does a new thing always require leaving another behind? » It is with sentences like these, both disarmingly simple and movingly profound, that the writer takes a look mixed with cynicism and disillusionment on society, ephemeral relationships, love.

The author has also experienced this change in life which is at the heart of her novel. And if we recognize a little of herself in her character (she was a musician and model before being a novelist, then left Paris for the Breton coast in 2019), this is what gives her text this feeling so special that accompanies us throughout the reading. Ann Scott is not one of those writers and artists who falls behind others in her way of thinking, and she expresses her marginality bluntly by drawing on everything – on the internet which has “destroyed everything” for artists, on social networks, on influencers and even on Netflix – pointing the finger at the cult of mediocrity that dominates our time.

In the end, what do we do with our disillusionments, our regrets, the encounters that changed us and the horrors we went through once we realize that we have passed the halfway point of our lives? We strip ourselves of everything to find ourselves: this is the observation that Ann Scott imposes in this masterful novel.