Artificial Snow is centred on the narrator’s love for Lou, a woman with whom he had a brief relationship and who has become an obsession. When his dreams of rekindling their lost love, and of living happily ever after, seem impossible, he imagines instead wrecking the worst acts of vengeance against her. This is a novel that ponders the despair of living in a world devoid of love and true companionship. “Where goes the white, when melts the snow?” asks the epigraph. It turns to sludge, Zeller suggests, and nothing will ever be as simple and good as it used to be. Zeller draws an urbane, witty portrait of the life of twenty-something Parisians, describing their insecurities, their preoccupations and their egotism.