In the pitch-black cell of an asylum - possibly in nineteenth-century France - an extended dialogue between the "baron" and a disembodied "voice" takes place. Arrested for a crime that he has no memory of, the baron swears his innocence throughout.
In contemporary France a man and his wife push one another into increasingly extreme situations in what is evidently a deeply twisted marriage. There is only one possible outcome as the stakes get higher and higher. And where there is murder, there must be a murderer . . .
A book where nothing is quite as it first seems, Bernardo Carvalho's ingeniously structured novel raises disturbing questions about the human capacity to deceive and damage.
