A witty, irresistible debut novel from award-winning poet Madhur Anand about entangled desire in books, life and love.

This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when the author of a popular science book attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. This novelist's recent book is an experimental novella that was written in English but published only in French translation—a language the novelist cannot read or understand. The scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to re-translate the novella back into English so the novelist can see how it reads. But as she embarks on this task, her own haunting memories, theories and queries—especially those pertaining to a long-ago passionate affair with a French lover—begin to insert themselves into the translation process, troubling it, then fraying it, and finally pulling it apart at the seams. As the scientist desperately tries to complete the project before losing control of her well-organized life, both the novelist and the long-ago French lover pop up in the present day, further complicating both life and art.