Mahir Guven was born in 1986, he was executive director of the newspaper Le 1 and of the magazine America, and is now literary director of the label “La Grenade” published by JC Lattès. In 2017, he published “Big brother” (Philippe Rey editions), Goncourt prize for the first novel 2018, Première prize 2018, Régine-Deforges prize 2018, Francophonie prize 2018, finalist for the Prix Médicis 2017, translated into fourteen foreign languages .
“Noé Stéphan, 35, is in police custody. The police accuse him of having intentionally killed one of his friends, Paul Chance, who had beaten his own wife. Noé pleads his innocence, he acts of an accident.
While Noé’s wife, Ayla, a lawyer, is slow to join him at the police station, the interrogation takes place in a tough way. Noé tries to run away, but his head hits the ground very violently, he is thrown into the cell semi-unconscious. He is about to die, he calls for help, it is then that the figures of his childhood appear to him: here he is before the tribunal of his conscience, whose judge is his mother, Jocelyne Daoulas. Current case? Determine how Noah got there. He must prove to the judge that he is innocent.
Noé then sees his whole childhood pass before his eyes and finds himself in Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, near Nantes. A first age marked by the absence of the father, and where his mother, La Joce, works as a temporary worker to maintain her son and his brother studying philosophy. On his mother’s orders, in the playground, Noé plays with the girls to avoid violence, but finds himself the victim of a gang of boys. He then befriends Gabriel Kalender, a child from the school, a Kurdish refugee, capable of routing anyone. The Kalender family welcomes him as one of their own, he espouses their cause and their struggles.
The first loves, the first times follow one another, while the absent father, supposedly “long-distance sailor” but in reality in prison, dies the day of his release in a car accident. The child must therefore construct his masculinity without a father figure. On the threshold of adolescence, Noé learns that his father was part of a Breton separatist network and sets off to investigate his own past. With love in all its guises (the inaccessible virgin, the confidant good friend, the cheeky initiator…), sport (incredible pages on underwater hockey!), sex, parties, fights, he discovers share of violence inherent in existence. Beware of Mother Joce’s judgement… if he wakes up from the coma into which the initial shock at the police station plunged him.
This epic of childhood among the young people of France from the middle classes, from the detached houses and from the small towns is an incredible contemporary “human comedy”, where Mahir Guven brilliantly mixes the serious and the comic, the lightness of the first times and the self-examination of an adult man, in a comical tone, close to dirty realism.” (Presentation of Grasset editions)