Sans Moi, by Marie Desplechin (Granta, £6.99 in UK)

Just about every clichΘ about slick, unbearably sophisticated and let's face it, unbearably French Parisian life is brilliantly torpedoed in this candid, intelligently restrained satire. Desplechin's sympathetic narrator has paid dearly for being a romantic. She is worried, depressed and desperate for love, but never explains why her marriage to a teacher collapsed. Instead she pursues the impossible and experiences the usual humiliations. Introspection is not her style. She has few illusions about being a freelance writer whose brief appears to be to make sense of boring speeches, books and articles she has no interest in - but it pays the rent. Into her domestic world comes Olivia, a serial sex abuse victim with a drug history who can't even cook. Still she becomes the au pair. Though billed as a novel about friendship and human understanding, Sans Moi is really a modern study of day to day survival. There are traces of "feel good" about it, and the narrator spends more time fretting about her mysterious au pair than her children, but it is a likeable performance far closer to contemporary US domestic fiction than it is to French.