A novel divided between France and Lebanon – Nantes and Beirut, to be precise – and between two different love stories. In Nantes, Donatienne, a young writer, is in a long-distance relationship with Jad, a journalist in Beirut. We learn about them through the impassioned e-mails he sends her. In the meantime, she is trying to write a history of the wars that affect her: the one in Lebanon, of course; but also the two World Wars that her ancestors lived through, and that Nantes still bears the marks of.  In Beirut, Kamila and Charbel are secret lovers, as the Civil War is tearing apart both their city and its people. They meet in their room every day, but every hour they are apart feels like an unbearable ending, a betrayal, a kind of sadness that they hid from each other with endless caresses, definitive oaths and light-heartedness in the face of this immense love. How can you make love in wartime? That simple, yet universal question haunts this tale.

In an attentive and delicate style, Cathie Barreau manages to express absence, fear and disappearance, as well as what makes war a vital experience in which people’s limits are tested.