We Might as Well Fly

A woman, with all we consider beautiful decaying, her blond hair faded, her frame bone-thin and her pale skin as waxy as death, quietly drops herself from the fourth-floor terrace of a four-star hotel near the Mediterranean coast. The last person to speak to her, Claire Halde, watches, frozen, as she clutches the falling stranger’s purse — a purse that whispers to her, in the universal language of women, that its owner no longer has need of such earthly trappings. A few feet away, Claire’s husband and children splash away in the pool, happily unaware. Time slows to a crawl. There is a trail of blood along the wooden deck from the woman’s cut wrist. She lets go. “All she wants is a few feet of freedom before hitting the concrete, like a breakaway in a cycling race, that thrilling feeling of slicing through the air.” From the boulevard below, there are screams.

Annie Perreault’s debut, The Woman in Valencia, translated by Ann Marie Boulanger, never...