They’ve been together for years, and he can’t stand their apartment any more. He wants a real house, with a backyard. She’s not crazy about the idea, but he’s determined and always winds up getting his own way. One morning, he takes her to visit a superb château in ruins. They could fix it up and both live and work there. He’ll open a fitness center; she can have her legal office. He’s enthusiastic; she gives in.

The château gradually turns into a symbol. Of the narrator’s being locked in by her own past – a childhood haunted by the ghost of her sister, who died at age 17 before she was born – and by her husband’s ascendancy over her.

References to Bluebeard are strewn across the novel: the blood, the real or symbolic locked rooms, the cell phone – a modern master-key – that becomes a sex toy, the key… And the husband’s secrets that are not what you’d think.

Bluebeard’s wife is the main character in this page-turner of a novel. She rewrites the folktale, like a palimpsest. Older stories – her own past, and the legend – never having entirely disappeared, they can sometimes be glimpsed through the rewritten tale.