" Adolf Hitler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yves Saint Laurent – German-born cabaret singer Ingrid Caven's life flowed around these icons of 20th century European counterculture.... a collage of that strange postwar period in Europe of high artifice, drugs, terrorism, leather jackets and cinema." – Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The novel... could be read as an intimate, literary dialogue between France and Germany. (Caven is German and Schuhl is French and Jewish.) That such a dialogue can be embodied in a single female character as seen through the eyes of her lover is a testament to Schuhl's originality and narrative imagination." – Speakeasy

"... a semifictional 2000 Prix Goncourt winner about the vagaries of 1970s European counterculture. . . . Schuhl's staccato yet contemplative prose (transl from the French by Michael Pye) illuminates celebrity excesses against a decadent and violent world backdrop." – Publishers Weekly

"Something between a love letter and a discarded Polaroid you happen on by chance, slightly yellowed, not even a date. Reading Ingrid Caven may be the most intelligent way to bid the century adieu." — Éric Neuhoff, Madame Figaro

"[Ingrid Caven in]… her many metamorphoses: a bohemian Madame Bovary, a redheaded noir vamp, an aristocrat in a boa, a singing sleepwalker." —Frédéric Bonnaud, Les Inrockuptibles

"Magnificent and violent, strange and disquieting. Provocative and harshly moving." —Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde Livres

Jean-Jacques Schuhl is a Parisian dandy who lives with Ingrid Caven and who had not published a book for twenty years until this one. Ingrid Caven was an immediate bestseller in France where it sold over 235,000 copies in its first year of publication. It has been translated into seventeen languages.

Michael Pye is a British novelist, journalist, historian and broadcaster. He has published eleven books including: The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, Maximum City: The Biography of New York, Taking Lives (released in March 2004 starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke and others), and, most recently, The Pieces from Berlin.