“On the other side of the glass, Franco and the children wait for me on the platform, bundled in their winter coats. I blow them a kiss that’s lost in the powdery gusts. It’s possible to think that, rather than returning, I am about to leave them.”

A novel of great mastery, navigating with a piquant humor in the troubled waters of a deceptive mirror game: fiction disguised as reality.

To understand what is happening in the present, the protagonist is sent spiralling through a flurry of fragments from the past into what becomes a kaleidoscope of sex, religion, money, violence, desire, memory, buried emotion, and disappointment—but what is real, and what isn’t? Aren’t our personalities constructed from grand illusions, deformed truths, and halfspoken lies? No matter what Mélissa Verreault writes, readers always ask if it’s based on her own life. So, why not play the game?