La Bleue Fortune de Mer

GIFTS OF THE SEA In Brittany you can't trust appearances or the weather. So when a little plane heading for Ouessant is boarded by two druids (a specialist in black bees and a pretty Spanish girl with a great mane of hair), anything can and will happen, and not necessarily as you might expect... Once there, they find a group of disorientated Japanese ornithologists, a Mr Pommereau who thinks he's a private detective, and the successful singer, Vassili, a darkly handsome Celt getting away from it all after a shameful sexual incident. In this tiny, insignificant place, their lives become entangled and their desires awakened over the course of three days. Surely everything that washes up on the shore is a gift from the sea? And shouldn't we take it rather than leaving it to be churned by the next tide?Confronted with a raging storm, they are held prisoner on the island, and have to face up to local legends, like the one about the giant octopus. Some of them have already been badly shaken by the rough seas and might completely lose their heads... Jean-Luc Coatalem is a writer and assistant editor on the magazine Géo. His most acclaimed books are Je suis dans les mers du Sud (Grasset, 2001), winner of the Prix des Deux-Magots and the prix Bretagne, Le gouverneur d'Antipodia (Le Dilettante, 2012), winner of the Prix Nimier, and recently Nouilles froides à Pyongyang (Grasset, 2013).