Used book – La foire aux célibataires, Xavier Patier

"I feel deep in my guts this truly incredible fact: there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of young women who find themselves pretty, and who are waiting for a man by writing anonymous ads in newspapers, which I can read here, at the Café de la Bascule, while drinking a beer. They truly exist, somewhere in a studio apartment or a student dorm room. They eat, they sleep, they run errands. Sometimes they have a car. They have a pretty face. They have a body, a body that God created in vain for love and the gift of life, an unemployed body, a body that doesn't fully do its heart's work, and also a soul, an unemployed soul that doesn't fully do its soul's work. They exist." The Bachelors' Fair is a novel about devotion and loneliness, about a son's relationships with a possessive mother and about impossible love.