Charlotte and Julien, an educated, middle-class Montreal couple, are set to leave on an eight-month excursion to Egypt. But two weeks before their departure date they have a massive row and Charlotte tears up her plane ticket in frustration. She refuses to go on the trip, but Julien is still determined to proceed according to schedule. Rather than tell their friends and family about this embarrassing situation, they decide they will pretend that both of them have made the trip, and in order to maintain the charade, Charlotte will hide out in a small cabin on the outskirts of Montreal for the duration of the journey. They get this idea from a 1972 film by Swiss director Alain Tanner called Return from Africa.

This is the first novel from Quebec author Francine D’Amour to be translated into English. The characters she creates here, despite the absurdity of their circumstances, are emotionally complex and entirely believable. They also have the type of intellectual lives rarely encountered in English Canadian fiction. These people can quote poetry or reference Egyptian mythology or talk Afghani politics without ever seeming elitist or effete. They are fully engaged with the world socially, politically, and intellectually in a way that seems normal and natural. How refreshing.

Not long into her exile, Charlotte starts to fall apart. She quickly descends into a personal hell dominated by alcohol and paranoia. As the charade unravels, Charlotte conducts a long monologue with her husband in which she imagines his journey without her and narrates the trajectory of her own downward spiral. From beginning to end, D’Amour maintains a swift tempo and is constantly turning the story around so that, before long, the true nature of the deception being conducted comes into question.

The ultimate resolution, though, is a disappointment. The ending is well set-up and internally consistent, and its intention is to be beautiful and sad, but it comes across instead as unnecessarily, and almost inhumanly, cruel.