A stirring and touching reminder that lasting love can exist after all, against all odds. Told in reverse chronology, this novel follows Alice and Jules, who are eighty-five years old. They meet on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Children are playing by the pool, a ray of sunshine breaks through the leaves of the trees. Is it déjà vu? Because what they now risk forgetting, and what began sixty years ago, started here: their life together. Step by step, from the end to the beginning. Age, routine, affairs, jealousy, becoming parents, marriage, passion: the two of them experienced all of this against the backdrop of Paris and the major historical upheavals of the last decades. This hopeful and tender book asks how love can endure and what holds us together. Perfect for book clubs—includes themes of love, memory, and history that spark discussion. Éliette Abécassis’s taut and poignant novel uses reverse chronology to explore significant moments in the lives of a Parisian couple. Jules and Alice meet in the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1955, when Alice is eighteen and Jules is twenty-two. Handsome Jules has a touch of “brilliantine” in his hair, and “expressive” Alice reads a book beneath the park’s sprawling trees. An exchange of intrigued glances leads to love, marriage, the raising of a family, discontented strife, and devoted caretaking in their later years. At the beginning of the book, Jules is almost ninety and struggling with arthritis and a heart condition. He visits the same park where he met Alice and converses with an engaging elderly woman; they seem to share an immediate connection. They later separate. As the narrative continues, Jules and Alice move from the unsettling effects of advancing age through their respective midlife crises and the births of their children. The intimate and happy early years of the couple’s marriage are detailed along with Jules’s service in the French Algerian War; the final reversal of time returns to their first youthful meeting. A shifting perspective offers insight into architect Jules’s wide-ranging interests and curious nature and Alice’s journalistic work and passion for feminism. While the book is compact, its impressionistic historical backdrop depicts pivotal events of twentieth-century European life well. Jules and Alice, both Jewish, lost loved ones in the Holocaust; their wedding is elegant and traditional, but they later join the tumultuous 1968 French student riots and support “activist” ideals. These more universal moments alternate with subtle and sensual interactions, heated arguments, infidelities, ironies, and repressed dissatisfaction. With eloquent and perceptive agility, the novel A Couple captures the emotional intensities of a unique and enduring partnership. -- Meg Nola ― Foreword Reviews "Abécassis proves once again how precisely she can illuminate relationships. In just 173 pages she tracks down all the moments that speak against the idea that love will last. She puts her finger on the wounds, shows the deep scars. Bittersweet, tender and powerful at the same time." ― Goodreads "An original love story told backwards, like the excellent film '500 Days of Summer.' Éliette Abécassis depicts a love relationship that transcends the wear and tear of time." ― Goodreads "Poetic and tenderly written [...] I had to read it again immediately after finishing the book. Touching and emotional, linguistically a delight." ― Goodreads Eliette Abécassis is a French writer and philosopher of Moroccan-Jewish descent, born in France. She also writes for the theater, the movies, and French songs. She regularly appears on television, on the radio, and collaborates with newspapers such as the Huffington Post, Elle, and Le Figaro. She is committed to associations for the defense of the rights of women and children and against violence against women: Le CorP, which she helped to create, against the commodification of women and children, as well as Exils intra muros, which defends families in the street. She lives in Paris. Johanna McCalmont is a freelance translator and interpreter from Norther Ireland. She obtained an MA in French and German at the University of Edinburgh, followed by an MSc in Translation and Interpreting at Heriot Watt University. She translates from Dutch, French, German, and Italian. Her work has been featured by No Man’s Land, New Books in German, and the European Literature Network. In 2020, she was a finalist in the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation. She is a passionate advocate for children’s books in translation and is a regular contributor to the World Kid Lit blog. In addition to working as a translator, she also interprets at international conferences and literary events such as the Bergen International Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Hay Festival, and the International Booker Prize.