THREE

A decades-old mystery comes back to haunt four childhood friends in this dark contemplation on growing up and apart.

Set in La Comelle, a small French town, the novel centers on three close friends in the 1980s and ’90s. Nina, Adrien, and Étienne meet in the fifth grade when they’re all assigned to the same dreaded teacher, and they quickly become inseparable. Through adolescence and into their late teen years, the group sees each other through the highs and lows of growing up. Virginie, a classmate, wants to be friends with them as well, but she’s always aware of the difference between the relationship they have with each other and the relationship she has with them. But by the time Virginie, now a journalist, moves back to La Comelle in the late 2010s, the three have largely lost touch. That changes when a submerged car is found in the lake where they once spent time together, a discovery that seems connected to the 1994 disappearance of an 18-year-old girl that haunts the four of them. While the mystery of the car and what it might contain is thrilling and heartbreaking, the real power of this work, translated from the French by Serle, is in the way Perrin captures the experience of growing up and the myriad ways Nina, Adrien, and Étienne give each other a place of safety—even as they are capable of inflicting great pain on others. While readers may want to know more about Virginie, her distance from the center of the story is fitting for the in-group, out-group tension that drives an underlying darkness from the very beginning.

Tender and often raw, this moody novel is a complex tale of friendship wrapped around a mystery.