This strange, uneasy love story follows Héloïse as she attempts to seduce the silver-tongued Doctor Lawrence Calvagh. A man forty years her senior, who may love her too. But Lawrence is not all he appears, and while Héloïse begins injuring herself so that he will stitch her back together, every other woman in her family also seems to be under his spell.

Reaching from the elegant salons of Paris to the golden sands of Corsica, the mountains of Algeria to the art galleries of New York, this subversive novel examines love at its most shocking and violent. And in Héloïse, as baby, nymphet, teenage mother, celebrated photographer, and wife, we have a truly provocative heroine.