Alien Hearts is the story of three lovers bound by bitterness as much as by passion. Maupassant's artist hero falls for a woman of the world, a dazzling beauty whose past with an abusive husband leads her to hold him -- like other men -- at arm's length. He seeks solace with his doting mistress but remains racked by pointless infatuation with the femme fatale. Award-winning master translator Richard Howard's English version of this complex and brooding psychological novel reveals the final, unexpected flowering of the great French realist's art.