Includes eleven short stories from one of the most heartbreaking French storytellers today. In one story, two girls risk everything by running away from home and their dead-end factory jobs in search of a more meaningful life. In others a man stands by helplessly as a place of great beauty and deep childhood memory is slowly consumed and destroyed by a quickly developing city, an illegal immigrant desperate for work finds himself the prisoner of a ring trafficking in human beings, and an adolescent girl encounters the violence of a gang of masked bikers in a hostile and desolate housing project. At once tragic and evocative, these engrossing and beautifully crafted stories touch upon the loss of human values in a rapidly changing world.