The woman in the row behind - Francoise Dorner

"As an entomologist of the ways of love, [Dorner] has a rare precision . . . we devour her book, realizing that it shows the building and the destruction of a couple carried away by work and day-to-day concerns. Her story is our own, and that is why we love it."
-Paris Match

To save our marriage I tried offering him another woman. He has started fantasizing about her. He doesn't know it's me . . . and she is now destroying us.

Nina and Roger have a humdrum marriage, not helped by the pressures of their work running a newspaper kiosk on the shaded side of a busy street in Paris. Shuttling between her straight-laced husband, her selfish mother, the father she has never known, and her best friend who has—inconveniently—just split up with her brother-in-law, Nina decides one day to leaf through the girlie magazines she sells every day. She glimpses a world of pleasure and desire, and innocently believes she has found a way of rekindling something that may never have been there. As she explores her own longings and discovers how attractive she is to other men, how can she fail to win back the attention of the man she loves?

“These bitter pages—which flay both the flesh and the heart—tell the story of a love which would rather commit suicide than leave itself to die. There is no doubt [with this first novel] an author is born.”
—Elle