The book
A June 2022 Indie Next List Pick
From the international bestselling author of Fresh Water for Flowers, a masterfully crafted and suspenseful story about the ties between friends and the choices that make us who we are.
1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part.
2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past, follows the case. Step by step she reveals the extraordinary bonds that unite the three childhood friends. How is the car wreck connected to their story? Why did their friendship fall apart?
Valérie Perrin has an unerring gift for delving deep into life’s depths. Following the thread of a sequence of heart-wrenching, inescapable events over the span of three decades, she draws the reader into a compelling story of love and loss, hope and grief, and of the distance that comes with the passing of time.
The author
Valérie Perrin
Valérie Perrin was born in 1967 in Remiremont, in the Vosges Mountains, France. She grew up in Burgundy and settled in Paris at the age of nineteen. The international success of her novels Forgotten on Sunday, Fresh Water for Flowers, Three, and Tata has made her one of the most widely read and most beloved French authors in the world. Fresh Water for Flowers (Europa, 2020) won the Maison de la Presse Prize, the Paperback Readers Prize, and was named an ABA Indies Introduce and Indie Next List title. It has been translated into forty languages. In Italy, both Fresh Water for Flowers and Tata (Europa, 2026) were the bestselling books of their respective publication years. In 2025, readers of ELLE named Perrin one of their top ten favorite French authors of all time. Perrin now lives in Paris.