BLACK BAG, award-winning poet/novelist tantalizes with identity-exploring novel

BLACK BAG
LUKE KENNARD
Zando (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 18, 2026

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I...don't know about the impact, impression, image this one's left on and in my brain. It's kind of a lot as a read. Many will flinch at the punctuation and dialogue tags being unorthodox. Others (me among 'em) will get cold collywobbles from the fact this is based around a real experiment performed in an academic setting.

I'll never be fully easy around stories where people do bizarre, kind of abuse-enabling things for money. Please see Docile by K.M. Szpara for my perfect squeam-book. This story is worse...it basically happened, though this is not non-fiction about the real events.

The premise, as you've seen, is weird...the jacket illustration is about the best match for the subject one will ever find. So there is no ambiguity or misdirection in aesthetic or factual presentation. That's where unambiguous territory ends in this story. Our actor MC, hereinafter "Black Bag" because his name is never vouchsafed to us, is slightly desperate for a paying gig, but as we discover over time he is generally slightly desperate. Dr. Blend (!) chose him well, deliberately, and knowingly as we learn over the course of the story. His job is to be physically present in the back of this psychology class, featureless and silent, for some socially experimental purpose.

It doesn't take long for the students to attempt interactions with Black Bag. Could you resist a looming presence that's giving nothing of any human sort? No eyes? No face? No noises of normal body functioning...breathing, swallowing, sighing...all muffled by the bag? What sounds uncanny would naturally become deeply unsettling, irresistibly fascinating, unnervingly alluring, as it sat among, but not a part of, the entire class. There are characters attempting to get responses from Black Bag. There are characters thinking of Black Bag, not obviously gendered, as a sexual challenge. Others as a gender-wars provocation. Others still as a threat of undetermined severity and unknown nature. What those responses start as, and how they morph through Black Bag's unresponsive presence, is utterly unexpected to the participants in the experiment.

Is that an entire over-300-page novel's-worth of story? It's true I was always interested in the read. As it happened, the story flowed from sentence to sentence with pleasurable facility of expression as one would expect of award-winning Author Kennard. At the end of the chapters...and there are 89 of 'em...I'd lose steam in the reading experience and it would take a week or more for me to feel prompted to pick it up again. I'm not entirely sure this is not related to my own participation in the experiment through the read...was I ever not part of the experiment, as in did Author Kennard not envision that the act of reading this story was another facet of responding to Black Bag? Was he also responding to the experiment by getting fascinated by the story, writing it...always an act of externalization as writing requires, at its core, a version of narrative therapy?

As we travel through the course being taught, the effects of the experiment on Black Bag himself morph and grow more and more pervasive. It's not surprising, on the one hand, that he becomes really comfortable in the protective space of the black bag. He's a struggling actor. His career prospects, before the anonymity of the black bag, weren't great. But inside the black bag, his identity is mysterious, intriguing, alluring...all things an actor loves, relies on for securing and doing his job. He wasn't being seen as those things walking around in his normal condition and now he is.

So walking around the campus and the town as Black Bag makes perfect sense, then.

Not to my claustrophobic self. I battled a sense of desperate, breathless resistance every time he put the stupid thing on.

So that might explain why I found the ending...wanting. Justine, a true and complete freak, enters into Black Bag's orbit with the firm intent of making Black Bag a conquest. Claudio, more reserved but still excitable and into Black Bag (apparently platonically though there's ambiguity and vibey-ness enough to make my gaydar ping) is the other side character who interested me. Others are involved, but honestly, they're just not that fascinating to me. Squishy, blah Sophie most of all. All the way through the read he's Black Bag, he's there as a screen for these people to project fantasies, needs, fears onto all blank and visually heavy like black objects tend to be.

The experiment, the last one Dr. Blend will conduct as he is retiring after this course, is ambiguous in design by design. That means it ends ambiguously. I was expecting that. I felt, however, this iteration of the story left the events unresolved in the dramatic sense...the final scene as an ending wasn't, the real ending as in the place the story resolved itself was earlier, with this musing inner speech from Black Bag:

Have you ever met a man who got exactly what he wanted? They always seem a little confused, even shell-shocked, They speak at one remove, as if delivering their own eulogy.
I wish to be alive, to continue to live, even should that mean a state of constant deferral. How much do you want to appear in other people's thoughts at all? As little as possible, I think. If I could, I would take everything I have ever thought about anyone else and delete it forever.

I think the story is fascinating but the not-main characters less so. I'd say this is an ideal library borrow, one that will reward you for reading it but not compel most of us to revisit it time and again.

ONE TRUE WORD, exhortation, plea, demand, or...?

ONE TRUE WORD
SNÆBJORN ARNGRÍMSSON (tr. Larissa Kyzer)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A #1 bestselling hypnotic psychological thriller from Iceland, in which a woman abandons her husband on an uninhabited island.

“So gripping I simply couldn't put it down. . . Atmospheric and original with an ending I did not see coming” — Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, author of The Creak on the Stairs

Why did she do it?

After a day of simmering tension on a trip to an uninhabited island, Júlia finally reaches breaking point. In a fit of fury she makes a reckless decision—leaving her husband Gíó marooned in the middle of a freezing fjord in the depths of the Icelandic winter. As the cold dark of night swiftly approaches, she leaves without looking back.

When she regrets her decision and returns, he is nowhere to be found. There is no trace of him, and no sign of where he may have gone. The police launch a manhunt, but soon their suspicion falls on his wife. In an attempt to shield herself from their speculation, Júlia weaves an elaborate net of lies, trying to convince the police—and herself—of her innocence. But as her story starts to crumble, dark secrets start coming to light.

As time runs out, Júlia races to discover what really happened. But is Gíó alive or dead? In hiding or hunting her down? And can Júlia get to the truth before it destroys her?

One True Word is a #1 bestseller in Iceland that has been acclaimed by authors such as Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the former Icelandic Prime Minister.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Júlía has a psychotic break and abandons her justifiably irritable "husband" on a little rocky islet in the North Atlantic Ocean. At night. In winter.

Despite the psychotic break, and the probable underlying paranoid personality disorder, she regrets her action and returns...the next day, after realizing she can't explain his disappearance away well enough to avoid legal problems, and fearing manslaughter charges...but he is not there.

This is bad. Epically bad. Contacting the police and spinning them a fantastical pack of lies, as she has done to evade blame her whole life (we meet the sister who hates her guts, and rightly so) she lives in fear that 1) the police will find his body, and b) he's alive and out there waiting to get revenge for what she did to him. And no blame on him if he is.

Her lies are ever more baroque and untenable. The legal system does what it is set up to do, poke into every corner and demand all the information, all the data, all the facts...but would Júlía even know a fact? Is there some...reason...for this psychotic break that she just can not face? Is she retrofitting details suggested, innocently enough, by the questions she has to answer?

In extremely short chapters and unadorned prose, this Icelandic thriller unwinds the worst moment of a wounded soul's life. It's tightly focused on Júlía, we never hear anyone else's thoughts or feelings except as they're expressed to, recalled by, her. It's not a nice place to be, Júlía's head...her perceptions are disturbingly off-kilter from the things she's reporting that she heard. Paranoid personality disorder? Abuse survivor? Both?

It's a book of questions, ambiguities, uncertain footings. If that and a very disjointed flow of story are not enjoyable to you, this ain't your read. I was drawn in by the sheer brio of a writer who focuses a noir thriller in the tightest focus on a woman who's undergoing a breakdown around her "husband"'s possible death, positive disappearance, at her own hands...unless she's dissociating, dissembling, desperately gnawing off her metaphorical arm to escape...what?

I detested Júlía, and thought her life was enough of a fantasyland that I was never fully sure Gíó, the vanished man she's not legally married to, was real. Could I even trust her to tell me the truth about that? Is it a lie or is her paranoia destabilizing my readerly radar that much?

I can't give five stars to the read despite the engagement and investment it elicited from me. Its ending was not on the same level of inventiveness as the rest of the story. It felt to me as though I was being dumped the minute after having brain-melting sex. Reality does this to me all the time; fiction should not!

I've also shaved off the partial stars because the short, choppy chapters that (I think) are intended to be in the places Júlía experiences breaks in her reality feel distancing, are in fact impediments to my connection to an already unlikable narrator. So I land on four of five stars but with the caveat that it's a better story, if not read, than this rating suggests.

DAVID FOENKINOS'S PAGE: THE MARTINS, his latest; & SECOND BEST, a very interior story of "missing out"

THE MARTINS
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘Go out into the street and the first person you see will be the subject of your next book.’

This is the challenge a struggling Parisian writer sets himself, imagining his next heroine might be the mysterious young woman who often stands smoking near his apartment...instead it’s octogenarian Madeleine. She’s happy to become the subject of his book—but first she needs to put away her shopping.

Is it really true, the writer wonders, that every life is the stuff of novels, or is his story doomed to be hopelessly banal? As he gets to know Madeleine and her family, he’ll be privy to their secrets: lost loves, marital problems and workplace worries. And he’ll soon realise he is not the impartial bystander he intended to be, but a catalyst for major changes in the lives of his characters.

Told with Foenkinos’s characteristic irony and self-deprecating humour, yet filled with warmth, The Martins is a compelling tale of the family next door which raises questions about what it means to be ‘ordinary’, and about the blurred lines between truth and fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't think most Anglophone readers are aware that "Martin" is the most common surname in France. In the US, the equivalent title would be "The Johnsons," our commonest surname. The joke being established, let's look at these bog-standard, government-issue, salt of the earth just folks. (I could probably pack a few more epithets onto that sentence, but I'll resist.)

Does everyone have a novel in them? As a former literary agent who read endless forests of murdered trees invested in the attempted proof of this nostrum, I'd say, "sorta...kinda...it depends...".

In attempting to prove this is a truth not merely a truism, an author sets himself the challenge in the first paragraph of the synopsis. He tricks himself into believing today will be the day he gets to talk to the alluring woman who smokes in front of the travel agency on her breaks.

"Ha ha ha," says Melpomene, reaching past her laurel wreath for the Mask of Tragedy. Following his self-imposed rule, he must interview an old woman pushing her shopping home. As any seasoned reader knows, here comes the punchline: Mme Madeline Tricot ("Mrs. Cotton") was once in the fashion industry in a small position thus has stories about Lagerfeld et alii being horrible to each other and everyone else.

Score! Or...is it? See, Mme Tricot is sliding into dementia. Her daughter, whom he meets immediately upon going home with Mme Tricot,is naturally very protective of her mother. Thus we're launched into an exploration of modernity, celebrity "culture," and the absurdities of aging...why extend the lives of the old relentlessly and pointlessly if all you're going to do with them is ignore and/or belittle them?...through the lens of The Martins, France's any/every/body family.

Why I enjoyed the read was that Author Foenkinos commits to the bit. He keeps our narrator saying he's reporting alone while, in fact, he's embroiled with the Martins. As a nod to his disingenuous self deletion while in fact performing self insertion, Foenkinos peppers the text with authorial footnotes explaining, justifying, in short intellectualizing, our narrator's many choices. Foenkinos treats us to the narrator's rocky relationships with the people he's trying to make into The Martins, his characters; we read the narrator's account of being termed a con man and an emotional vampire, accusations he, reluctantly, acknowledges carry some truth in their hurtful rejection.

Changing from novel, to non-fiction, to memoir, to metafiction in turns, The Martins is a charming and entertaining exploration of the overlooked, the unconsidered, the devalued, as full and satisfying subjects for our attention. It thus shines a searchlight on the tendency of modern storytelling to ignore simpleness in favor of simplicity. Making their own lives easier by inventing Big!Important!Amazing! people whose lives and doings have only the depth of a narrative purpose, Foenkinos implicitly accuses himself and other authors of avoiding the incredible richness with its immense labor of La Comédie humaine, to cite an ancient example. We're ever less likely to get to know, really know, the people around us, even our own family members as this novel quite clearly demonstrates.

It lends this entertaining read a special poignance, and makes the only slightly veiled warning to our distracted selves sting a good bit more. Multilayered meditation on storytelling, stories, the tragedy and comedy of ordinariness, and the need to attend the moment you're in: A very twenty-first century kind of a read. One I recommend to almost everyone except those in the throes of divorce or breakup, or the recently bereaved.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SECOND BEST
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Megan Jones)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A witty, moving international bestseller about a 10-year boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter.

It's 1999. Martin Hill is 10 years old, crazy about football and has a minor crush on a girl named Betty. Then he makes it to the final 2 in the casting for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

In the end, the other boy is picked for the role of a lifetime. A devastated Martin tries to move on with his life. But how can he escape his failure, especially when it's the most famous film series in the world? As Martin grows up, he finds every aspect of his life is invaded with a sense of failure and missed opportunity, and he struggles under the weight of the life he isn’t living.

This bittersweet comedy is full of surprising truths and touching moments, as its unforgettable character discovers that sometimes, the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be.

An international publishing sensation, Second Best has been adapted for stage and won the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Published in 2022 in its original French and brought out this week by Pushkin Press after their acqusition of Gallic Books, this is a wonderful meditation on the idea of "almost" as it defines us. Our Western culture valorizes "winning," defined as gaining an objective, fulfilling a need to see ourselves in those who exceed or transcend averageness, mediocrity; this is invidious. By definition, there are more who do not "succeed" or "excel" than those who do; the bar moves ever farther from the mass in the middle, and we are subtextually told we're not as good as, as deserving as, as successful as the few that excel.

Capitalism 101 there...create scarcity from abundance, then keep the abundance away from the maximum number of people.

Being on the outside of the circle, then being uprooted from the normalcy of his life before tragedy of s familial sort scars him further, Martin is a kid who's asked to bear social burdens way above his paygrade. Similar circumstances have crushed adults (famously Pete Best, though the comparison is unfair and inexact) into tailspins more intense than Martin's. Adolescence is hard enough...putting this on top...well, it's no wonder Martin begins to fanatically and fearfully avoid the cultural juggernaut that was Pottermania.

Not terribly successful, that. With the expected consequences.

Watching a talented, not exceptional, adolescent fall into psychosis was uncomfortable to read. Martin imagines...carefully note verb choice...people are laughing at him, judging him, thinking of him as second best, because this epic piece of bad luck befell him. This is, to an adult, clearly imaginary; also clearly missing that most painful of adolescent lacks: Perspective. Watching Martin stumble and bumble his way through what could have been a very good career indeed turned into a prison of self-doubt and fantasy...well...it's rough for me as a reader to soldier on, resonating as I do to his terrible, ongoing struggle. Reading the rumination, by definition repetitive, of someone caught in their mind's cruelest trap...what might have been...is, no matter how brief (only 200-ish pages), quite an ask for entertainment.

Author Foenkinos was inspired to write this story by an interview with the film in question's casting director who recounted the process of anointing Daniel Radcliffe as Potter in contrast to another boy who didn't have some quality Radcliffe did. I do not know if that other child was ever named in any other venue. I certainly hope not. Bad enough to lose out; worse to be known as the loser. The story moves at a slow pace because rumination is not susceptible to the plot drivers that keep us flipping pages. It is an interior novel, this, one that says "here we are in this head and here we stay" which isn't quite the same thing as a récit, but really closely related. In both there is a relentless inward gaze. It gets wearing.

That this would make a very interesting French film is undeniable; it's purported to have been adapted to the stage, though I can't find any official source that mentions this. I can barely imagine how Foenkinos is getting away with mentioning Potter at all without The Lawyers℠ being all over him like vultures on a gut-cart for not paying Warner Bros. a cut. (Maybe he is; I kinda doubt it.)

What I found troubling is the way this examination of fame culture was presented in its downside was pointed but never pointed out. I'm not sanguine about the readers attracted to the story getting a sense of resolution from the ending. It's why I'm only offering four stars for a five-star idea.

TONGUELESS, unnerving psychological novel of losing your home without leaving it

TONGUELESS
LAU YEE-WA (tr. Jennifer Feeley)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping psychological thriller that sheds light on the current political situation in Hong Kong.

Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin—or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.

Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city’s uniqueness—especially its language—is at risk of being erased.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: China has been on a multigenerational project to Han-ize all the Sinosphere. Hong Kong's significant Anglophone population has been able to attract some out-of-China interest in the Han's Borg imitation, and from everything I've seen coming out about it in English, resistance is risky if not futile.

As little pale imitators, US fascists are doing their best to marginalize and poison the information space. No one in their dream world will know what to trust, therefore will accept their stupidification without the fuss and bother of rebellion and resistance to them. I think what's happened is that's scare a lot of people. Ones who weren't necessarily thinking about it before. Books like Tongueless can send painful shocks into the ideamakers that encounter it. Set in a very basic institution of Hong Kong culture, a language school, we are prepared in the set-up for those very reactions by those of the characters.

Teacher Wai is a very passive person, unable to put herself forward agreeably, or frame and present an idea persuasively. Her affect is so rigid that she's become faceless, just a messily-dressed part of the crowd. This works well enough while she's left alone to keep doing what she has learned to do. She is blindsided by the mandate to switch from her native Cantonese to the Han people now in charge's Mandarin. It's not like having to use Aussie or Indian slang and adapt to an accent. It's like having to learn, then teach in, Dutch. The alphabet and some words would look familiar but pronunciation let alone grammar? Not a hope. Wai, in her oddly passive way, sets about learning Mandarin but founders agonizingly slowly as the hopelessness of the task sinks in.

Ling's a Mean Girl. She's made it on marginal ability plus ruthless indifference to others' feelings or needs. She hides this behind a surface smarm...sorry, charm...that slips her in under peoples' radar. That route to her success is now closing off because it just won't teach her Mandarin. Poor Wai, with no interpersonal radar, is a prime victim for Ling to hate on. Ling's own focus on surface perfection and flawless presentation of self finds no echo in Wai. She doesn't understand the point of these things and lacks the flexibility to adapt to learning them (or Mandarin) to Ling's contempt...well-masked from others. Wai's failing attempts to survive in this horrible, cruelly indifferent new system lead to a true tragedy.

What's funny is that Ling is, on the surface, so good at masking that she presents herself as super-agreeable, and accepts that their language, Cantonese, is no longer going to be the one they're allowed to use...these're good Chinese girls, after all, and Authority Has Spoken. The manner of the adjustment is the difference between Wai's tragedy and Ling's desperate attempts to avoid failure, not the fact of its external imposition leading to resistance. It doesn't.

It's a brutal story. It's told directly...I picture Ling, our PoV character, sitting before an inquisitional interview recounting this story directly to us, the "camera" so to speak, with many soft little smirks and touchings-up of her hair and make-up. Ling is the one who, in Author Lau's subtle hands, shows herself as a slacker caught in a new system that pitilessly highlights her basic failures and failings in relation to that system. The narrative shifts in time though not always seamlessly. The very first pages give away a giant spoiler, but it is needed to set up our time-hopping. Ling is undergoing before our eyes the fate her students, to whom she always showed a smooth face hiding her contempt, worked hard to escape...and she can not do what they tried to do.

Ling escapes Wai's fate. She does not escape the fate of social collaborators everywhere: She loses her camouflage and has no skin underneath it to protect herself. Hiding is not possible; no protection or help is forthcoming.

I sometimes felt the story was in fragments of time or shards of context that did not always scan with my idea of what I had read. There was a reason for that; I'm going to urge you to read the Translator's Note before you start the story. I don't want to spoil certain things but spoilers are part of the book from page one! However, if someone chooses not to follow my advice, they should be able to proceed as they prefer. I myownself think "spoilerphobes" are spoiled, but no need to rehash THAT conversation.

Politically this story of a bullying overbearing linguistic minority imposing its words, values, and culture on hapless victims caught in an economic and social trap, suffering the loss of long-unexamined and too-little valued traditions and freedoms, could not possibly be more timely to read for the entire Anglophone world.

TRAP FOR CINDERELLA, psychological suspense and unnerving truth-telling

TRAP FOR CINDERELLA
SÉBASTIEN JAPRISOT (tr. Helen Weaver)
Gallic Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of A Very Long Engagement, comes an ingenious psychological thriller.

A young woman wakes in a hospital room. What happened to her and why is a mystery. Is she victim or murderer?

The young woman has been badly injured in a fire and has amnesia. But what happened to her? Is she Mi, Micky or Michèle, or Do, Dominique? As she struggles to rebuild her identity, she starts to recall the crime that was committed and the house on the French Riviera. She remembers the rich heiress and the faithful friend – but which is she?

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU. STRONG CONTENT WARNING FOR ENCAVMAPHOBIA

My Review: As ever with this author, do not expect the usual, simple setting down of sentences to form beautiful images and sanguine characters, but the unsettling reversals of point of view and the sheer variety of events as told by people with different viewpoints.

Even when those people are in the same body. And no, there are no external markers of the changes. You have to work for your pleasures!

Pleasures there are, and aplenty, in this twisty tale of utterly unreliable narrators. Mi, Michèle, or Do, Domenica, or whoever she might be, is unreliable because her trauma...caught in a fire, either the perpetratrix or the intended victim of it, makes little difference after simply being trapped in a fire...has robbed her of her memory. Those around her are, to put it mildly, motivated by pecuniary gain and thus aren't entirely to be trusted. The doctor is no help to her in recovering her true self. But the more questions the narrator asks, the more she realizes that it's very, very possible that she simply does not want the answers to those questions.

What's wrong with simply...existing. Allowing the tidal wave of love and sympathy to sustain her. Whether or not she "deserves" it.

The concept of merit, of being worthy, of having one's just deserts, is a huge issue in this story. While there is no way that such a tale would be possible in the twenty-first century, when a simple DNA test would establish instantly and once and for all who she was, the way the plastic surgeon worked miracles for her is the primary obstacle to believability in this psychological horror story. I have seen a truly badly burned person and let me assure you they would not be passable in social settings. For the amnesia plot to work, however, there is a need to suspend this level of disbelief.

The sense of dread, of not knowing where one is in the life one is living, is a palpable horror. The idea of surviving a fire is traumatic enough...but to then realize that everyone around one is lying by omission, or directly...? How can that possibly be anything but a waking nightmare?

It is at this Rebecca-meets-Gaslight level that the book works best. Let go of the practical knowledge you possess as a 21st-century reader and travel back to 1963 (when the book first appeared in French) to allow this fearsome reality to submerge your sense of the firmess of your own foundations. Be there with Michèle...Domenica...whatever her name is.

Be there. That might very well be the epitaph of each of the people who die in this book, especially the ones sentenced to prison for crimes they might have, or did, commit. The crimes that, in the end, meant nothing...caused nothing that had not already happened. And isn't that just the awful way of crime? It's really, in the end, pointless.

Agonizing pain for pointless goals. How very, very noir.