The delightful and daring entertainment by French author Herv? Le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the crisscrossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel... Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject-- Harry Mathews's "Singular Pleasures"--Herv? Le Tellier's "The Sextine Chapel" celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone--and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.

Translated by: Ian Monk