Translated from the original French by Sam Taylor
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.
Nicolas Mathieu was born in 1978 in Épinal, a small town in north-eastern France. After studying history and cinema, he moved to Paris, where he worked variously as a scriptwriter, a news editor, a private tutor, and a temp at City Hall. His first novel, Of Fangs and Talons, won the Erckmann-Chatrian prize, the Transfuge prize and the Prix Mystère de la Critique. His second novel, And Their Children After Them, was published to universal acclaim in 2018 and won various prizes including the most coveted prize in France, the Prix Goncourt. He lives in Nancy.
Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than sixty books from French including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby, and Marcel Proust’s The Seventy-Five Folios.
A bleak tale of the disenfranchised, in this case the factory workers and others living in a small town in the Vosges region of France. Things start to go downhill when the factory is set to close, then it gets worse. Compelling enough to want to read all in one sitting. Very excellent. – The State Library of South Australia
| Author | Nicolas Mathieu |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton |
| Nominating Library | The State Library of South Australia |
| Translation | Translated from the original French by Sam Taylor |
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