The Woman Who Walks On Glass: short stories

On the shore of the St. Lawrence River, a writer paces the beach and collects multicoloured pieces of glass that the tide has made soft as pebbles. Each is unique, a small miracle, the fruit of a long and patient work of the elements, of chance. She classifies them carefully. At the same time she collects characters who gradually inhabit her white page. There’s a couple who visit Bruges and realize that nothing will ever be the same again; a student who peels an orange instead of writing his dissertation on happiness; a woman who comes home to an empty apartment that her companion has just left forever. There is the little girl who turns herself into a filmmaker to shoot scenes with her dolls having sex, and there are children at summer camp waiting for their mother on the night Marilyn Monroe died. In these stories Christiane Frenette demonstrates the ways in which life works on beings, making us witnesses at the elusive moment when their deepest truth shows through the surface.