Besson revisits the epistolary novel with a rare elegance of mastery. On a universal theme (separation), he offers an invitation to travel, a testimony on the invisible violence of romantic breakups, and an ode to the writing that saves.

When the man she loves leaves her for another woman, Louise decides to flee Paris. But neither the trip nor the exoticism of Cuba are enough to dispel her grief, to divert her thoughts from her lover. In order to maintain contact with him, however trivial and masochistic it may be, Louise decides to write him a series of letters, like throwing bottles into the sea. From Havana, New York, Venice, the Orient Express, and even Paris, where her exile ends, a single-voice correspondence is born, implacably honest and poignant. It combines memories of happy times, the beginnings of a breakup, the heartbreak of abandonment, and the despair of solitude. Soon, it becomes clear to Louise: the true recipient of these letters is none other than herself. Throughout this process, the possibility of healing emerges... Philippe Besson likes to impose formal constraints on himself to provide a framework for his fiction. By reappropriating the genre of the epistolary novel, he makes each letter a meditation on love, the couple, the loss of the absent one, the solitude necessary for self-reconstruction... And demonstrates that all work of mourning necessarily involves words. Besson's unique style, both dense and lyrical, is complemented by an admirable ability to embrace a feminine sensibility. With this optimistic novel, the author of A Moment of Abandonment deliberately breaks with the darkness of his last writings.