Every day, Monika is the first to enter the Beauty Institute before anyone else. She’s a foreigner, with Polish roots, and she doesn’t care for the grey, impersonal city where she works. Every day, before the clients show up, she looks nostalgically back at her childhood: back then she lived on a farm, in a real country, with real seasons. She remembers that she and her sister used to have one-track minds, wondering obsessively how children came into the world. Monika observes, listens to and sometimes judges the women that file through her workspace. They all tell stories, some superficial, others more private. Alix, who rejects the man who loves her; Adèle, an old woman whose head was shaved after the Liberation in 1944; the butcher’s wife, a pale, shivering, solitary soul… Bodies is a poetical novel. Far from the slick, insipid bodies that women’s magazines toss out for instant gratification, Fabienne Jacob searches women’s bodies carefully. This is a sensitive portrait of contemporary womanhood.