Sleeping Dragons

Baudoin's beguiling portrayals of day-to-day lives belie the unsettling feeling of things unseen and unsaid, and on the verge of falling apart. In the title story, a pregnant woman on an eco-adventure to escape a recent break-up finds herself heading towards an even murkier future. In "Mengele in Love," a chambermaid in a hotel reminisces about her lost love for a previous resident. As Alberto Manguel observes in his introduction "each story takes a situation to unexpected extremes, and the endings are always surprising and subtly justified."