Lending her a pair of shoes, picking the kids up from the school gate, lying to the police… How far would you go for your best friend? but her weak impressionistic style makes for an unmemorable narrative, despite the salacious subject matter. Mas tem uma história fortíssima, claustrofóbica, triste, que nos esmurra e nos faz querer amparar esta mulher que nunca chegou a ser.

She invents quotes from high-up anonymous sources: “a figure close to the government,” “a well-placed observer who asked to remain nameless. Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Publishing for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review. Now Adèle, the novel she wrote before that breakthrough success, has been translated into English by Sam Taylor. Where Emma Bovary wants life to be as sweepingly lush as the romance novels she's devoured, Adele desires something far more complex, something that she - and we - are hard pressed to identify and delineate. There are not any big reveals or twists, but the inside glimpse at this woman’s life is perfectly gripping.They don’t want to be outcasts so they marry, have children, work at respectable careers---YET, this doesn’t mean they are able to quash their secret SELF. However, his fixation on black magic and his unrealistic blame on Malika's mother for their breakup make his character appear delusional, rendering his storyline somewhat vague. Privileged psycho she-beast in a shitty marriage sleeps with half of Paris but the sex is weird and boring and then her husband finds out and then the marriage becomes even shittier, but they stay together anyway and so what? The world’s hardest cynic bumps into the last of the great romantics but their pasts dictate their futures can never be simple. Anyone who has any kind of capacity to truly let go and give into yourself with any kind of desire to hold on for dear life - Do it.

But the author sounds her voice loudly in this book, and her sense of self is captured throughout the pages. In the run up to the big day long buried passions are reawakened and hidden secrets revealed; the group realise that a lot has changed in twelve years. I was scared that Dora would jeopardise her chance at escaping the game and having her own safe happy ever after thanks to this final jaunt. Readers who know addiction well, understand that sex could be interchangeable with any vice; gambling, eating, smoking, drugs.

So this short novel is slightly flawed, but hey, this was Slimani's debut, and she was certainly not playing it safe, and I appreciate that. Some readers perhaps will see there hidden, erotic fantasies of the author though I don’t read it that way. When I finished it, I was left with the difficult problem of understanding why I had liked it so much, when I was so unmoved by Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau, a book with a very similar plot and set-up, but in Zurich instead of Paris.

Somewhere at the end Adele thinks to herself that eroticism can cloud everything, but her world felt bleak and depressing nonetheless. I assume it had to be a kind of psychological study of a person in the grip of addiction, in a tangle of desires impossible to satiate. As the book progresses, we see how a typical day unfolds from Dora’s perspective and this was quite the eye opener.A book about keeping traditions and breaking them, a book about love, bravery and most of all – HOPE.