The day he turned 16, Aldo Brandini found a book sitting on his desk: The Opposing Shore, by Julien Gracq, with an enigmatic note inside, So that you’ll know where you came from, that was probably written by his father.

The young man identifies with Aldo Aldobrandi, the hero of Gracq’s novel, right away – to the extent that he even adopts the hero’s motto, I’ll transgress borders. He decides to head off on the trail of clues to the lives of his father’s parents, which leads him all the way to Syrtis, in Libya, at a time of military tension between Gaddafi’s army and the Americans.

The novel opens in 1981 and ends in the summer of 2016, in the city of Sirte, which is in the midst of ISIS’s chaotic collapse. A period of armed conflict and tremendous tension, leavened by the narrator’s love affair with the beautiful Zohra, who he met in Libya.

Current events and historical fiction, literary references, searching for one’s roots… Je transgresserai les frontières can (also!) be read as a surprising adventure story.

Reading Gracq’s The Opposing Shore leads the narrator to look for his own roots. Action, humor and fine literature all rolled into one.