For a start, this is the story of Bastos, the cat who always has to sleep with one eye open because his elderly person, Raymond, when nervous, tries to shoot him with his rifle. It’s also the story of Raymond and Mine, who despite their advanced age (and fits of felinicide) are in love like two kids. It’s also the story of their daughter Josette and her womanizing husband who runs into a placid deer one day at a 110 kilometres an hour. And the story of Rémi, the son of this couple-non-couple, who goes to live with his grandparents (and the cat). Then there are Pierre, Paul and Jacques – twelve, eleven and ten years old – who cultivate a precocious little vice, and timid Pierrot who works in a funeral parlour but has a secret ambition. Marie-Rose, instead, prepares delicious dishes with disgusting ingredients and waits for Momò the roadman to ask her hand in marriage. And while Geneviève writes love letters to a convict, Édith goes to bed with her best friend’s husband and Flo does horoscopes that she herself doesn’t take seriously. And what about Arnaud, Martine, Robert, Bobba and Youka the puppy? Everyone is involved in conflict (with himself or herself, with another, with the world) and every one is sucked into that vortex of coincidences and fatalities called life. Amidst unmentionable vileness and coming-outs, neuroses and loves, Barbara Constantine juggles stories that are sparkling and corrosive in a unique and colourful plot. We laugh and we cry about the reflections of a dog that goes to Heaven, the dreams of a boy whose mother is too absent, the hopes of women in search of happiness, the repentance of weak and/or wicked men, the lucubration of a cat who’s really been around. A hilarious and cruel novel that flies high in the electric skies of irony, but strikes right to the heart.