Hervé Le Tellier

By reconstructing the dazzling life of a Resistance fighter who died in 1944, Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the Prix Goncourt 2020, becomes an everyday historian, reviving the poignant destiny of a hero who touched him. With this moving book, he also signs one of his œhis most personal works.

In the Drôme, five kilometers from Dieulefit, a "village of the just" and a hotbed of gentle resistance, André Chaix (1924 - 1944) is just one of the names on the Montjoux war memorial. The name is also engraved on the wall of the house the author is restoring. Who was this FFI Resistance fighter born just over a century ago and disappeared at the age of 20? A cardboard box in which the family kept a few "precious and tiny traces", "the dust of his life", will enable Hervé Le Tellier to reconstruct his story and understand his commitment. In this captivating tale, in which nothing is invented, the writer abandons his usual Oulipian constraints to advance by fragments and associations, before adopting his hero: "... halfway between the image of a father and the reality of a son".