this broke my heart 

Laurent Petitmangin: What you need from the Night. 2023.

It was the one winter night when father and the younger brother, Gillou, arrive home to find Fus, the older brother, on the sofa, beaten half to death.

This is when it all changes.

Before this this diminished family lives in a former mining town in Lorraine, northeast France, where prospects are few and class solidarity is waning and there,

"nobody voted for Macron"

The family had a mother but then, the three agonizing years, and mother dies of cancer.

After the mamam ´ s death, father sinks into his sorrow. The boys try to cope and soon Gillou, he goes off to college in Paris. Fus, the former footballer, is left to live in a quiet home with father. Now mother dead, little brother out of town, father and Fus descend into small talk and avoidance.

Their relationship broke my heart, the non-talking of father and Fus, the road Fus should have never chosen. The avoidance of the situation was written so brilliantly.

All and all, the prose was tense, so tight and wonderful tensed.

And then, as mentioned, after Fus finding his pack with the extreme right wing and, that one winter night, it all changes. For decades.

The whole book was so dramatic, too real and this book that gave me insight (more than Edouard Louis ever) about France, about poverty about violence, about poverty about immigration, about

education and radicalization.

About manhood

this was an important book, a great book.