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Harry, thirty-four years old, dies in tragic circumstances, leaving behind his fifteen-month-old daughter. Forty-two years later, this daughter meets a woman who knew Harry as a child during the Algerian war. Through her narrative, the story of this star-loving father from a great line of doctors unfolds. Exiled from Algeria at the time of independence, they rebuilt a medical empire in France. from scratch. But the seeds of destruction lie at the core of success. Harry meets a woman of incendiary beauty. Their passion will crush everything.
Autumn 1977: Harry, thirty-four years old, dies in tragic circumstances, leaving behind his fifteen-month-old daughter. Forty-two years later, this daughter meets a woman who knew Harry as a child during the Algerian war. Through her narrative, the story of this star-loving father from a great line of doctors unfolds. Exiled from Algeria at the time of independence, they rebuilt a medical empire in France. from scratch. But the seeds of destruction lie at the core of success. Harry meets a woman of incendiary beauty. Their passion will crush everything. At the other pole of this dark fable, the author recounts with brutality and humor a childhood haunted by the grief that threatens to consume her entire life.
It is a novel about the twilight of a world, the ordeal of mourning, about mental illness that was damnation before being an opportunity. And at the same time a great love story of a child who should have died but became a writer and became a writer because, one night, she made a promise to her father’s ghost.
This book is not a book by a psychoanalyst. Instead, it is the book of a dynamic and fearless prose writer. Her dark lyricism, shocking phrases, and the way she works out the basic motifs and their repetition assume the risk of an exaggeration but always avoid it with remarkable grace, managing to touch the sublime. (…) A book whose every page burns with a dark fire.
This book is a profoundly moving text, a personal but universal description of mourning that is a mysterious phenomenon that is unique and common to us all.
Sarah Chiche
