Un après-midi dans le désert

One afternoon in 1992 the monthly mail reaches a remote village on the edge of the Sahara, at the foot of the Lion Mountain, slowly eaten by the desert, left by its Europeans and deserted by its young. Sam the postman, who often reads the letters aloud to the old people left behind, finds one from Petit-Frère, the rebel everyone believed dead, and hides it unopened. It could close a story dating back to 1957, and it stirs memories: the famine of 1947, his boyhood with Petit-Frère, and the village's people, among them Mathilde of the Hôtel des Peupliers, the aristocrat Ursuline de Kergariou, the teacher Bermann, the imam, and Hafnawi, last of a Bedouin family, who stood up to the legionnaires and won over the hotel keeper. Their loves, jealousies, hopes and defeats trace the passing of one era into another.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

269 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Politics (assigned by AI)

First published

2008 by Gallimard

Author's age

71 when first published

ISBN

9782070120437 (original)