Adeline Dieudonné’s hotly anticipated second novel is an acerbic masterpiece in the style of Real Life.

A petrol station somewhere in the Ardennes, one summer night. An old woman knocks back several beers before climbing over the motorway crash barrier. A dozen or so people witness her demise. Juliette the cashier and her colleague Sébastien, married to Mauricio. Alika the Filipina nanny, Chelly the pole dance teacher, and Joseph, a travelling salesman specializing in mites… Each character becomes the hero of their own story.

As in her first novel, Real Life, the author fleshes out quietly crazy lives with ferocious wit. The novel is full of flashes of sheer surrealism, like the couple with a fully grown sow for a pet, the doctors who welcome their future daughter-in-law to dinner with a full pelvic exam, a top model who finds water revolting because dolphins swim in it, and a son chatting away quite happily to his mother’s grave. Adeline Dieudonné spares her readers nothing. Murders, full-on sex scenes, terrorist attacks, laughter and tears. Underpinning the surface humour and inventive scenarios in an unflinching, sardonic gaze that always hits the mark. The book asks deep and important questions about the meaning of life, knocking the stuffing out of our modern condition.