Imagine a man who will be anything you want. Who will listen attentively to every word you say and intuit everything you don't. A man willing to explore all the dark corners of your body and your mind. A man who wants only your pleasure - Such is the charm of Fabrice, a tattooist toiling away in his own dark world in Paris. A modern alchemist, Fabrice is seeking perfection through transformation. He knows how to attract women, and he knows how to love them, but Fabrice wants total submission: if he can dissolve a woman's ego, melt it down, he will find gold. One fine spring, Fabrice meets three wildly different women who have one thing in common: their vulnerability. Zairah, a trainee lawyer from a bourgeois family who have not yet spotted that she is bulimic, is shocked but intrigued when Fabrice first shows her his lighter with the picture of an alien sodomising a big-breasted woman on it. Falling for him is the best thing that has ever happened to her -- and the worst. Yoshiko is fresh from Japan, rebelling against her formal background and overbearing father. She has a lot to learn about the French language and western culture, and is pitifully lonely.
How is she to know that Fabrice's attentions have nothing to do with what happens in a real, grown-up relationship? Xanthe opens her arms to Fabrice to obliterate the memory of her abusive ex-boyfriend. She drinks too much and is heading for a breakdown, mastering her pain with a pharmaceutical pick-and-mix. Could she be the one? Will Fabrice strike gold with Zairah, Yoshiko or Xanthe? How far does debasement have to go before someone becomes so lost that they can't say no? Dark and compelling, this is a modern fable set on the edge of society where normality blurs into the extreme; where there is an invisible line that any woman - a woman you might know - could cross.