Some survive by forgetting time. Others survive by worshipping it.

Jean arrives in Sète with no ticket, no luggage, and a folded scrap of paper reading Sanctuary Appartement Éternité. The building is called Le Grand Éternité. It hums. There are twelve buttons on the intercom and twelve nameplates, and one of them already says Jean.

Inside are the residents: the damaged and the dangerous, the devout and the long past caring. Christian. Toussaint. Zaff. And Raffi, whose name has been crossed out, and whose voice will not stop talking.

Bruises Like Diamonds is a darkly comic novel that arrives the way memory does — in fragments, out of order, insisting on the wrong details. A dog track. An exit interview. A tortoise in a handbag. The pieces find each other slowly, and what they assemble is a book about dignity when certainty has gone: how arbitrary suffering is, how strangely compassion turns up, how much weight one small kindness can carry.

Perhaps, held to the right light, the bruises themselves shine.

If perchance you're reading this in a bookshop and there's a man nearby in a Stetson — I rejoice and I despair. Follow him. It's already too late.