L'Écume des jours

Colin is young, wealthy, and idle, living a charmed life among friends in a Paris that runs on its own dream-logic—where a cocktail can be mixed by playing the piano, a pet mouse comments on the household, and rooms shrink or brighten with their owners' moods. When he meets and marries Chloé, his happiness seems complete.

Then Chloé falls ill with an impossible affliction: a water lily growing in her lung. To keep her surrounded by fresh flowers, Colin spends his fortune and his freedom, and as his money runs out the whimsical world that once indulged him turns cramped, grey, and cruel. Around them, friends chase their own obsessions to ruin.

Boris Vian's surrealist classic is by turns playful and devastating—a love story told in puns, jazz, and invented machines that curdles into one of the most heartbreaking depictions of loss in French literature. Originally published in French, it is celebrated for its inventive language and its tenderness beneath the absurd.