Description
Book SynopsisTHE FIRST NOVEL BY NICOLAS MATHIEU, WINNER OF THE 2018 PRIX GONCOURT
Nicolas Mathieu's gripping first novel is the story of a world that has come to an end. With a girl, a gun and acres of snow.
When a factory that employs most of a small town is scheduled to close - to the despair of the workers and disdain of the overlords - things start to fall apart. The disenfranchised factory workers have nothing left to lose. Martel, the trade union rep with innumerable tattoos and Bruce, the body-builder addicted to steroids resort to desperate measures. A bungled kidnapping on the streets of Strasbourg goes horribly wrong and they find themselves falling prey to the machinations of the criminal underworld.
"[An] uncompromising portrait of a working class eaten up by the frustration and resentment of having been abandoned, and sinking into alcoholism and racism". -- Paris Match
Trade ReviewBefore Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt in 2018 for
And Their Children After Them he wrote this
remarkable novel about two small-town scallies who resort to crime when the local factory closes down . . . Mathieu, a wonderful writer,
echoes the grittiness and compassion of Émile Zola in Germinal * Sunday Times *
There are several intersecting stories in this
bleakly uncompromising portrait of working-class life in the Vosges . . . this tale of helpless, resentful people with nothing to lose is
powerful and compelling. -- Laura Wilson * Guardian *
Award-winning novelist Nicolas Mathieu portrays how the destruction of working-class communities has fed cynicism and despair. -- Conrad Landin * Jacobin Magazine *
A first novel of rare power * Le Figaro Littéraire *
Nicolas Mathieu has written one of the best crime novels of the year * Le Monde *
