Five parts, like five very private letters, compose The Workshop of the Dead. Each one evokes one of the Fabiens, a family from the Doubs (a French department bordering Switzerland), which happens to be the narrator’s own family. Sometimes one has to re-bury one’s dead. Either because it hadn’t been done properly (a brother), or because they had died a bad death (a father), been imprisoned in overwhelming glory (a mother), or trapped in a block of silence and dread (an uncle), or because one liked to think they weren’t dead because the family pretended they had never lived (a sister). The dead can be neglected, just as people can be. The neglected dead suffer inside of us and make us suffer in return. This lucid and indisputable novel doesn’t aim to console the living – after all, they’re big enough to do it for themselves – but the dead, who are as fragile as children or the elderly. With The Workshop of the Dead, a sublime mausoleum, Daniel Conrod finally frees himself from the weight of his past. In search of a nugget of truth, the writer offers each of his relatives the place and the peace due to them.

A French family – with its secrets, its shame and its suffering. A funeral oration like an epic poem to reconcile the present and the past, the living and the dead.