Things put underground in New Orleans don't often stay there. Even things that should - like bodies, and secrets.
How do you fight an enemy you can't see that can kill on a whim? In 1820s New Orleans, on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, Zéolie Cheval discovers the mangled body of her father murdered in his bed and a maniacal voice haunting the recesses of her mind. When the priest sent to comfort her is killed while the house is swarming with police, Zéolie becomes entangled in a web of mystery that takes her from the French Quarter, to the Ursuline Convent in the Ninth Ward, and deep into the Louisiana swamps.
Officer Louis Saucier, who is losing his heart to Zéolie and his grip on logical reality, helps her find the pieces to her puzzle. The mother superior of the Ursulines offers assistance from a mediumistic nun and a voodoo priestess, blurring the lines between the spiritual and the supernatural.
After opening the family crypt to find it uninhabited, Zéolie realizes that her father lied about her mother's death - amongst other things. Now, Zéolie must come to terms with magic she inherited from her grandmother and the price that comes with it.
Step inside the magic and mystery of the 1820s French Quarter to see if an unlikely menagerie can help Zéolie take down a murderous maniac while she shields the officer she loves. Can she harness powers she didn't know she had? Or, will she make the ultimate sacrifice?
L. exercait sur moi une veritable fascination.
L. m'etonnait, m'amusait, m'intriguait. M'intimidait. (...) L. exercait sur moi une douce emprise, intime et troublante, dont j'ignorais la cause et la portee.
D. de V.
Une autofiction prenant progressivement des allures de thriller, explorant l'ambivalence entre la fidelite aux faits et l'invention, dans une atmosphere oppressante. Raphaelle Leyris, Le Monde des livres.
Delphine de Vigan joue de la porosite des frontieres qui separent le reel et la fiction avec une conviction qui donne par instants le vertige. Nathalie Crom, Telerama.
Une oeuvre d'une puissance emotionnelle infinie. Christine Ferniot, Lire.
Prix Renaudot
Prix Goncourt des lyceens
'Captivating and perversely delightful.' The Wall Street Journal
In this gripping imagining of the last hours of President Gaddafi, Yasmina Khadra provides us with fascinating insight into the mind of one of the most complex and controversial figures of recent history.
'People say I am a megalomaniac. It is not true. I am an exceptional being, providence incarnate, envied by the gods, able to make a faith of his cause.'
October 2011. In the dying days of the Libyan civil war, Muammar Gaddafi is hiding out in his home town of Sirte along with his closest advisors. They await a convoy that will take them south, away from encroaching rebel forces and NATO aerial attacks. The mood is sombre. In what will be his final night, Gaddafi reflects on an extraordinary life, whilst still raging against the West, his fellow Arab nations and the ingratitude of the Libyan people.
Reviews
'Captivating and perversely delightful.' The Wall Street Journal
'Khadra has a good sense of pace: the leader's thoughts turn over at the right speed.' London Review of Books
'World-class' Rosie Goldsmith, The Independent
'Mesmerizing' The New Yorker
'Packs a devastating punch' Shortlist
'Compulsive, funny, powerfully emotional..sinuously intelligent. Khadra's perceptive and confident novel, translated from French by Julian Evans, is an unmissable entertainment.' Guardian
'Bold, often mischievous... A wonderfully entertaining read - as commanding and schizophrenic as the psychopath who 'speaks' its words.' The Big Issue
'Effortless first-person reimagining of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's final hours' Library Journal
'In this closed-door drama, which reads almost like a piece of theatre, Yasmina Khadra gets inside the mind of a tyrant awaiting the fatal bullet.' Le Point
'The ability of the author to infiltrate the mind and personality of Gaddafi is uncanny. It is very well written and compelling.' D.Olser, NetGalley reviewer
'A skilled storyteller working at the height of his powers.' TLS
'Khadra brings us deep into the hearts and minds of people living in unspeakable mental anguish.' L A Times
'I loved the idea of this book and it was fascinating to read about Col. Gadaffi in a fictionalised setting.' Sarah S., NetGalley reviewer
Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl who had run away from her convent school just before New Year's Eve, this ad set Modiano on a quest to find out everything he could about Dora Bruder and why she ran away from the Catholic boarding school that had been hiding her. He found only one other official mention of her name: on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942.
With no knowledge of Dora Bruder aside from these two records of disappearances, Modiano continued to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he found in official records or through remaining family members, Modiano transforms into a meditation on the immense losses of the period--lost people, lost stories, and lost history. As he tries to find connections to Dora, Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Occupation and the paranoia of the Petain regime. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result is a montage of creative and historical material that unfolds as a moving rumination on loss.
