Normally, Jocelyn should not have gotten a room at the Pension Giboulée.
Mrs Merle, the landlady, is adamant: this respectable New York boarding house accepts no boys, not even one with a pretty French name like Jocelyn Brouillard.
Yet, thanks to his talent as a pianist, thanks also to a small lie and to a miraculous ingredient he unknowingly carries in his trunk, Jocelyn is allowed to stay in the basement. It is 1948, he has been in New York for only a few hours, and he feels as if he has arrived in a madhouse.
And he must keep a cool head, because there are only girls here.
They are dancers, acting apprentices; all short of money and spending their time rushing to auditions.
Chic has eaten so much Campbell's tomato soup for an advertisement that the colour red alone is enough to make her nauseous.
Dido, despite her young age, has problems with the FBI.
Manhattan has been plagued by worry since she was five.
All these young women have a secret that even their best friends do not know.
Especially Hadley, the most mysterious of all, who no longer dances though she once danced with Fred Astaire, and who sells matches each night at the Social Platinium.
Hadley, for whom everything changed on a snowy night in a train. A train called Broadway Limited.
The most dizzying book by Malika Ferdjoukh.