A Couple

by Eliette Abécassis, Johanna McCalmont (Translator)

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 their life together. Step by step, from the end to the beginning. Age, routine, affairs, jealousy, becoming parents, marriage, 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.

152 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 14, 2025

About the author

Éliette Abécassis, née le 27 janvier 1969 à Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), est une femme de lettres, réalisatrice et scénariste française.

Reviews

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

📚A Couple
✍🏻Eliette Abécassis
Blurb:
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 their life together. Step by step, from the end to the beginning. Age, routine, affairs, jealousy, becoming parents, marriage, 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.
My Thoughts:
This story was a ride. A short book that packs such an emotional punch. I cried, laughed, was infuriated; felt all the emotions with the characters. So well written. Beautiful prose. Eliette Abecassis's A Couple takes us back through the years, showing the relationship between Alice and Jules as it finishes toward the end of their lives, and revealing one step back at a time how their relationship evolved to this state. We see how Alice missed all the signals from the very beginning.
We find Alice to be introverted, but loving and capable, increasingly aware that she’s being overlooked, and Jules politically progressive, and outwardly committed, but with a fatal blind spot when it comes to the emotional and domestic labour that underpins their life.This isn’t an attack on marriage, but a delicate study of how love buckles under the weight of routine, expectation, and the suspicion - despite all the love and goodness in a life - that one has missed out on something, and been untrue to one’s sense of self. And when two people have been so close, so enmeshed and blended, for so many years, whose history
Thanks NetGalley, Grand Books and Author Eliette Abécassis for the advanced copy of "A Couple" I am leaving my voluntary review in appreciation.
#NetGalley
#GrandBooks
#ElietteAbecassis
#ACouple
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Connor Milstead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in the evening and with a deeper focus I sought to really love this one. Passionate and strong. The sense of growing relationships come with crumbling sensation, but a fault point beforehand. The years leading up to said collapses, which may or, may not. Give us the ability to mend wounds before repairing them. I enjoyed this on a rather dreary day, and the sub-plot to the literary plot makes just as good a partner as the book itself.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

How is it possible that I’m the first review on here? Loved this heart punched book and loved the view it took of complex love

[Chelsea Lensing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to follow at times because of the reverse timeline. The translation seems a little off at points. Wish I read French.

[amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was heartbreaking. their relationship really was doomed from the start :( i loved the reverse chronological storyline.