This novel features a woman who initially appears as Rebecca Dorothea Rebland, a 'free' but emotionally constrained author with a vague background from Erfurt. It tells the story of a failed transformation, a ruinous 'becoming'. To escape her life and suffering, the generous behavior of a publisher allows her to visit the small town of Rye in Sussex to write a report about it for the hopelessly Anglophile German-speaking readership. There, she encounters a murder case that occurred in the mid-18th century, which she believes she needs to research anew. However, what actually happens during her stay in Rye is Rebecca's (who is called Becky there) futile attempt to emancipate herself from her tormentor in Erfurt and to find herself. This attempt is 'taken from her' by a mysterious French artist whom she initially meets only casually in Rye. He 'kidnaps' her to Paris into his quirky yet surreal art world, where the pattern of her dependency repeats itself even in this radical self-alienation—her new lover/tormentor only calls her 'Lucile'. She 'becomes' a Lucile but does not fully transform. At the end of this atmospherically intensifying prose lies a physical injury as well.

Rüdiger Gruner, born in 1957 in Rottweil am Neckar, is a writer and critic, founder of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature and the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations. Since his retirement as a professor of modern German and comparative literature at Queen Mary University of London in 2013, he has lived in Bad Honnef near Bonn. Rüdiger Gruner is a recipient of the German Language Prize (2012) and the Reimar Lüst Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his lifetime achievement (2015).