Ingrid Thobois takes the reader of Sollicciano on a heartrending and ever-surprising journey deep into the psyche of a complicated woman and the men she loves. A compelling, breathless novel about the intersection of love and psychosis.

As the novel begins, Norma-Jean, a French woman in her fifties who has retained her fragile glamour, is living in Florence to be close to her former student, now an inmate in the Sollicciano prison for the murder of his cheating fiancée. Each time Norma-Jean visits the talented yet violent writer, she brings an article of his that she has had published and collects from him the draft for the next. And at each visit she must endure the insults with which he batters her, tortured by his inability to forgive himself for his crime of passion.

From this enigmatic beginning, Thobois takes us, in fitful bursts, into Norma-Jean's past. Her writing shifts fluidly between multiple perspectives, but she is ever watchful of her unhinged heroine. Through Norma-Jean, her husband Jean, and her student Marco, we watch her early traumas—a rape, an abortion. We see her struggle with mental health, her sessions with her psychoanalyst, her marriage to her psychoanalyst, and the disintegration of that marriage. And through the same three viewpoints, we watch her growing obsession with her quiet, shifting, and effeminate student, the one with anger boiling beneath his quiet exterior.

Thobois makes the reader feel uncannily at home in the mind of Norma-Jean. Yet how can we be completely comfortable with the woman who, without warning, packed up and left her husband while he was away for the weekend? How can we begin to understand the woman who then had him institutionalized for spousal abuse, using his estranged sister as the committing physician? Slowly, Thobois lets us come to terms with the woman whose self-destructive behavior draws her ever closer to a prison in Italy.