What will save a woman in her thirties from an existential crisis—prayer or white magic?

Apolline has just turned thirty and is at her wits’ end. The last in a long line of heartbreaks has pushed her over the edge into a deep malaise just when her editor has commissioned her to write an essay for young people about demoralisation. She consults her doctor in the hopes that he will help her out of this bad patch, but he prescribes her a remedy that is surprising to say the least: one month without men.

Sceptical but resigned, she leaves the Belgium of her childhood to set up home in her aunt’s empty and run-down house in Conques, a picture-postcard village on the route of the Camino de Santiago. But between the presence of Brother Charles, an attractive monk from the abbey who tries to convince her of the virtues of prayer, and pressure from her editor, Apolline is all over the place.

Lacking a suitable medical cure, she turns to a book of white magic found in the attic and decides to revisit all of her relationships with men. From perfect Ulysses to Olivier the married man, from Sébastien the saxophonist to the ghost of Henry Miller, she follows the threads of her love affairs—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to finally free herself from the past.