A bookstore creates debts. Financial ones sometimes, but especially sentimental ones. When Yvonne dies, Abdel, a young teacher – a.k.a. a foot solider for the nation – in Roubaix, a working-class bastion in the north of France, is overwhelmed with memories. He can see himself as a child in that room full of books, with his tremendous hunger to gobble up all of Balzac even though he hardly understood a thing. He just can’t resign himself to the idea that that living, breathing shop could disappear. Still, from there to agreeing to take over the store is a big step – one that his subconscious leaps right over without so much as a backward glance. So now Abdel has to deal with the economic difficulties of the bookseller’s profession… and with his predecessor’s dangerous photographic archives. As he sorts though dusty old boxes in the back, whole episodes of the Algerian War – when the country was torn between the FLN, the Harkis and the OAS – spring back to life.

Saïd, who looked like such a simpleton hanging out at the bookstore – what was his real role? What secrets is Rosa, who works at the same school as Abdel, hiding? And how might Zerouane, the head of an organization called Binding Together, feel about all that?

So many questions. Political ones, and romantic ones, too... How will our hero choose between Zita, the fake ingénue with the marshmallow kisses, and his exuberant, fiery colleague Rosa?

Michel Quint has written a novel with strong political ideas about about culture and society. By reexamining the wounds of the Algerian War, he reflects upon the multicultural roots of today’s France. And on our vital need for solidarity.