My Phantom Husband

What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, vanished? When would you begin to panic the first hour, the first night? A deceptively simple story about a deserted woman, My Phantom Husbandis Marie Darrieussecqs eerie followup to Pig Tales, showing her to be a writer of great subtlety and depth. When her husband goes to buy fresh bread and never returns, the young narrators life changes for ever. Night after night she has to learn to be alone, to sleep alone, to live in a space she has shared with a man for seven years. Yet who was he, her husband, and did they really have much in common? Why cant she remember her love for him or even what he looked like? Dragged into a world of visions, she is besieged by childhood terrors monsters behind the furniture, vampires floating around in the dark, strangers walking in other rooms. She begins to see her husband, or an apparition of him. Is he a supernatural visitation or the product of madness or a figment of her guilty conscience? My Phantom Husband is a profoundly unsettling parable about the way love appears and disappears, about the absences and evasions that can lie hidden in any relationship.

Year of publication: 2000
Pagination: 160 pages
Format: Paperback