Laurence Tardieu’s latest novel is a beautiful portrayal of one woman’s desperate search for her mother’s identity. When Alice Grangé was five years old, her mother passed away. Her father, an introverted man, never spoke of his deceased wife nor kept any trace of her, leaving his young daughter to cope alone with the loss and bereavement. Their silent relationship only intensifies her need to fill the void in her memory. Day after day, the ghost of her mother would haunt Alice, as she tried to create an image and a voice for her in vain. As she grows older, her need for answers to her many questions consume her. On her father’s deathbed, he unexpectedly tells her the name of a man her mother had an affair with before she died. When Alice finds this man, she manages to persuade him to talk to her and discovers that her mother was a painter and that they look alike. It is in one of her paintings, in fact, that she sees her mother’s face for the first time. Through the encounter with the man her mother loved last, Alice finds at last the courage to begin to live a life of her own.

The title is a reference to Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum (Dream of Love), which movingly echoes the dream of love Alice always had about her mother.