Côte d'Azur

"There is a specific shame to being twenty-one years old, lying on your boyfriend's bedroom floor in Antwerp on a Tuesday afternoon, listening to an attendance bot listen to a lecture on Caravaggio for you."

So begins The Yacht Chronicles, a literary series following Anouk de Smet from the floor of a Berchem flat to the upper deck of a 70-metre Mediterranean yacht.

Four days after she breaks up with Lars, Anouk lands in Nice with a borrowed Samsonite, three white polo shirts from H&M, and a cousin's contact at a marina in Antibes. She does not know how to fold a fitted sheet. She has never served champagne. She is twenty-one, but the manifest says twenty-four.

Over the course of one summer on M/Y Aerope, from Saint-Tropez to Capri to the bay below Stromboli to a quiet anchorage off Mykonos, Anouk learns the architecture of a charter: the silver service drill at oh-seven-thirty, the swan folded with a pale blue ribbon, the chief stew's quiet authority, the engineer with the Heidegger paperback, the Belgian billionaire's sixty-eighth birthday party, the fourteen Krug champagne flutes that fall on teak in a silence that lasts approximately two and a half seconds.

She learns to write postcards to her fourteen-year-old sister, one from every port. She learns that a widow's hand can hold yours for an hour, in the bay off Olbia, with the body of her husband still in the master cabin and the captain on the bridge waiting for the coastguard. She learns, on a night in the laundry below Capri, the voice it takes to say Mr Halberg. I need to go past you. Now.