A woman leaves Paris without warning, taking her young daughter with her and heading toward the Basque coast.

She withdraws money, tells no one where she is going, and offers no clean explanation for the flight. Behind them, the abandoned husband begins searching; ahead of them is the sea, hotel rooms, beaches, strangers. Her life becomes suspended, an atmosphere instead.

Originally published in French as Le Mal de Mer, the novel is one of Darrieussecq’s eerie, compressed studies of disappearance, motherhood, and bodily drift. The French title carries a double charge: seasickness, but also something like “mother-sickness” hiding inside it. There is not much plot in the blunt mechanical sense; the force is in the atmosphere, the dislocation, the feeling of a woman slipping sideways out of domestic visibility and into water, weather, refusal. 

Faber and Faber paperback, 2002, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale. Good second-hand condition with light general shelf wear; binding sound and pages clean.