Christian and Carole live in a dilapidated old shed on a plateau in the middle of nowhere. Once a month, the young back-to-nature couple leaves their remote, rustic home behind to drive to the nearest mall to go shopping. One day, one little thing leads to another, and suddenly everything goes wrong. Between their place and the mall, via a Chinese restaurant and a visit to grandma, plus one final, nocturnal expedition to a vending machine, Carole et Christian weather the Sturm und Drang of an ordinary odyssey, with neither grandeur nor victory in sight.

If you look at it the right way, in the course of a day like that, a thousand things happen that say a lot about our lives: little nothings which – though they last but a moment – still manage to betray our deepest cracks. What haunts us is always there. Unlike her previous novels, which were largely imaginary, in this third book, Myriam Chirousse writes in a state of lucidity and connection with reality. Le Sanglier is a tightly written, precise novel brimming with sharp, minimalist tension; lunar purity in the adjectives, and clarity that draws us near to the burning fire of catastrophe. The doors of hell are just below our mall-centered lives…

Twenty-four hours in the life of a couple.