I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. This was a beautiful and unique book, a story of a marriage told in reverse. When it starts, Jules and Alice are in their 80s. But as the book goes on you learn of the struggles they had, the affairs, historical events they endured, good times, children, the fights, all the way to when they first started. This book was magical in the way it makes us as the reader look at life in this way. I found myself reflecting on things I may think are tough in my life but then remember how and why they started and became a part of my life. This is a relatable book for me and probably for everyone who reads it. I was swept away by the realistic marriage of this couple.

I got this ARC from Netgalley and all I can say is that the story is beautifully heartbreaking in so many ways. You can relate to Jules and Alice and their story and how, eventually, we’ll experience the same things they did.
10/10 would recommend

To be published in October 2025, this slim, sharp, novel tracks the stately maelstrom of Alice and Jules’ marriage with a forensic eye.

The story is told in reverse chronological order, so we meet the couple first in their late 80s, estranged by illness and time. Their history unfolds through the tumult of time, world events, and crises in their native France, all the way back to the days when they dazzled and consumed each other.

We find Alice to be introverted, but loving and capable, increasingly aware that she’s being overlooked, and Jules politically progressive, and outwardly committed, but with a fatal blind spot when it comes to the emotional and domestic labour that underpins their life.

Chiming with my recent read of @ellie_levenson’s smart Room 706, we find a marriage assailed by a steady crescendo of unspoken resentments: who does the school run, the laundry, the emotional patchwork that holds the household together? Abécassis writes with a cool clarity and wry humour, capturing the alarming dichotomy of being deeply loved in theory, while fading into the background in practice.

What struck me was the book’s empathy for both: Jules isn’t villainised, but shown as someone trapped by inertia and blind to his own assumptions. And Alice—still respectful of the life they’ve built—begins to feel the stirring of something more, something quieter than rebellion, but no less profound.

This isn’t an attack on marriage, but a delicate study of how love buckles under the weight of routine, expectation, and the suspicion - despite all the love and goodness in a life - that one has missed out on something, and been untrue to one’s sense of self. And when two people have been so close, so enmeshed and blended, for so many years, whose history is whose?

A Couple is brief but beautifully sharp, offering up the honest ache of wanting more without losing what matters. It’s a small book that knows exactly how to linger.