This existentialist debut novel is so French. It tracks the tortured sex life of a nameless woman who works doing announcements for the Métro and spends her spare time contemplating, in vivid detail, her amorous failures, plus getting mixed up with characters like a transvestite performer and a North African drug dealer. Céline Curiol’s prose is unsentimental but moving. On her protagonist: “There had only been two men in her life. And she had never understood what they wanted from her.”