Antonin Varenne – författare

"We owe you our lives, Sergeant, but you are our worst nightmare . . ."Burma, 1852. Sergeant Arthur Bowman, a sergeant in the East India Company, is sent on a secret mission during the Second Anglo-Burmese War. But the expedition is foiled - his men are captured and tortured. Throughout their ordeal, a single word becomes Bowman''s mantra, a word that will stiffen their powers of endurance in the face of unimaginable suffering: "Survival". But for all that, only a handful escape with their lives.Some years later in London, battling his ghosts through a haze of alcohol and opium, Bowman discovers a mutilated corpse in a sewer. The victim appears to have been subjected to the same torments as Bowman endured in the Burmese jungle. And the word "Survival" has been daubed in blood by the body''s side. Persuaded that the culprit is one of the men who shared his captivity, Bowman resolves to hunt him down.From the Burmese jungle to the slums of London to the conquest of the Wild West, Antonin Varenne takes us on a thrilling journey full of sound and unabated fury, reviving the lapsed tradition of the great writers of boundless adventure. Sergeant Bowman belongs to that breed of heroes who inhabit the imaginations of Conrad, Kipling, Stevenson . . . Lost soldiers who have plunged into the heart of darkness and will cross the globe in search of vengeance and redemption.Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

1871. Pete Ferguson is a wanted man. An army deserter, hunted for murder in Oregon, not to mention theft and arson in Nebraska.Taking the name of Billy Webb, he is hired by bison hunters, but leaves after a bloody dispute. He then takes the Comancheros Road, which he follows to Mexico, and then to Guatemala . . . Whatever he does, wherever he goes, Pete is a magnet for trouble and seems incapable of making the right choices. The violence that follows him keeps him away from those he loves: his brother Oliver, still on the Fitzpatrick ranch with Aileen, Alexandra and Arthur Bowman.It is a woman who will change his destiny, an Indigenous woman driven out of her lands. To save her, Ferguson will sabotage an attempted coup d''état and together, they will go to the Equator that has become Ferguson''s grail, and where the malevolent forces governing this world must finally be defeated.

It''s as if he''s being mocked from beyond the grave. When John Nichols arrives to identify the body of an old friend, he is immediately caught up in the detritus of Alan Musgrave''s life, the side of Paris the tourists don''t see, where everyone has a past but very few count on a future. But what can he expect from a man who bled to death in his own excruciating S&M stage show? Now there''s a maverick police lieutenant on the prowl who thinks that Musgrave''s suicide was murder. Guérin might not look like much, but he''s one of the few honest officers on the force. As the horrific extent of police abuse is revealed, the race is on to find the link between a slew of recent suicides - and the key to it is buried deep in Nichols''s past. Bed of Nails does for Paris what James Ellroy did for vintage America, shining a light as never before on the seedy underbelly of La Ville-Luminère.

Paris, 1900. Aileen Bowman arrives at the Exposition Universelle, where all the world has gathered to witness the birth of modernity. A journalist in her mid-thirties, unmarried and fiercely independent, she has been sent to cover the Exposition for the New York Tribune, and her arrival soon creates a scandal in the city of lights. But it seems the life she left behind on the distant Nevada plains may have followed her across the Atlantic, and before long Aileen finds herself caught in a deadly tussle between the old world and the new. The final volume in Antonin Varenne''s epic historical trilogy, The Canvas of the World takes us to heart of Paris, from the emerging metropolis to the neighbourhood brothels, in a novel driven by passion and a yearning for freedom.Translated from the French by Sam Taylor