The story is set in Geneva, more precisely at the International Labour Office (ILO), against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
Comme le sable (As the sand) inaugurates what Alice Rivaz had conceived as a ‘novelistic cycle’ in several volumes.
Thanks to an independent lifestyle and a home of her own in Geneva, Alice Rivaz published her first novel in 1940.
The author questions the normality of sheltered lives, and their blindness in the aftermath of the First World War.
Le Creux de la vague (The trough of the wave), the follow-up to Comme le sable (As the sand), was published twenty or so years later (1967).