Translation of: Le coeur est un muscle involontaire.

Florence, a twentysomething web designer, is beautiful, loveless, and stuck in a seedy on-again, off-again relationship with her employer, a half-Mohawk, half-Italian whirlwind of a man named Zeno Mahone. Zeno is obsessed with the works of Pierre Laliberté, a sort of Québécois Thomas Pynchon, whom Florence unwittingly encounters in a hospital at the bedside of her dying father. Zeno commissions her to find out all she can about Laliberté, and she soon finds herself being wooed, rebuffed, and mentored by the reclusive author.

Canada Reads, 2004 finalist