They were predicting storms for the end of the day but the sky stayed blue and the wind died down. I went to take a look in the kitchen - make sure things weren't getting clogged up in the bottom of the pot. Everything was just fine. I went out onto the porch armed with a cold beer and stayed there for a while, my face in the sun. It felt good. It had been a week now that I'd been spending my mornings in the sun, squinting like some happy idiot - a week now since I'd met Betty.'

BETTY BLUE remains a cult book and film nearly twenty years since its first outing. The extraordinary story of an erotic, doomed love affair has transfixed hundreds of thousands of readers around the world.

Translated by: H. Buten