Elastic

When Alice is with Mathilde, her experience of being in the world shifts and slows down, as though Mathilde brings with her a force that charges everything around her: the park bench, the sticky linoleum floor of the supermarket, their interlocked hands, the buttons on a winter coat. But Mathilde is also mercurial and "perfectly" married to Alexander, and Alice is moving into a bigger flat with Simon who has just returned from Vietnam. Alice’s precarious solution is to proceed into a quadrilateral relationship, impatient to define her own outline in the eyes of others.

Bille gleans the nebulous distinctions between love, sex and intimacy in clean and clear prose, exerting a softly fragmentary style that underpins Alice's vacillations.