Neptune Room

de Bertrand Laverdure, Oana Avasilichiaeoi

"Sandrine's parents are dead--or they're about to be. Her father, certainly; her mother, not quite yet. Alone and suffering from an incurable disease, the eleven-year-old girl finds companionship in her doctor, Tiresias, who morphologically changes sex in unpredictable ways and seemingly without anyone noticing. The Neptune Room, a melancholic tale about the mysteries of identity and the power dynamics associated with it, opens a door unto a universe of agonies: the long agony of an entire civilization and, microscopically, the spectrum of pain experienced by a young girl and those around her. Voicing anguish and perpetual mourning, The Neptune Room is a poetic novel, at once artful and compassionate, kaleidoscopic in its chronology, and resoundingly sombre. It is about change, great and small, and all the little deaths along the way--both public and private."--