Joseph is a hired hand on a farm in the Cantal, in the center of France. He’ll be turning 60 soon. He knows all the farms in the area, not just how they are now, but their past, too. A gentle, quiet man, he fell in love with Sylvie one summer when he was 30. She wasn’t from around here, and had suffered a lot – both with and because of men. She thought she would take comfort with Joseph, but instead, he wound up paying for the others. In the middle of the winter, Sylvie left with another man. Joseph began to drink, like falling into a bottomless pit. Joseph has a married brother. Better looking and more ambitious, he went to find a better life elsewhere, and after their father died, he brought their mother to live in his home. So Joseph is alone, and will end his life that way. He is a witness, a voyeur of other people’s lives.

Joseph is the new opus from Marie-Hélène Lafon. A moving novel with a deep underground river running through it – a river with the name of a woman, a servant: Félicité. With talent and humor, Marie-Hélène Lafon pays a magnificent tribute to her beloved Flaubert…

A masculine A Simple Heart set in the Cantal in the present day.