Emmanuel Carrère – författare

Brought to you by Penguin.A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France’s leading non-fiction writerOn 13 November 2015, nine attackers wearing suicide bombs killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded at sites in and around Paris in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War. V13 was the code name for the much-awaited trial of those who helped to carry out these attacks. Lasting nine months, from September 2021 to June 2022, it consisted of 14 defendants, 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers and a file 53 metres high.In V13, Emmanuel Carrère follows this landmark trial from its first day to its last, taking us behind the scenes to the lawyers, survivors, family members and the defendants. He assembles, in painstaking and subtle detail, a human portrait of the crime – a study of good and evil, and the philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two.Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre, fusing passion, curiosity and a profoundly humane intellect, making him one of the most distinctive and important literary voices today.‘Forensic and troubling, deeply humane, utterly gripping, a book of singular importance for our times’ PHILIPPE SANDS‘Brilliant. Clear-eyed, wise and compelling’ PAUL MURRAY© Emmanuel Carrère 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Winner of the Prix MedicisThe award-winning literary nonfiction writer turns to his own family's archive and unlocks a century of war, obsession, deception, and truth.The day Emmanuel Carrere is set to fly to Russia for the film adaptation of his book Limonov, a "special military operation" begins in Ukraine. Unease ripples across the world. Nevertheless, Carrere goes and, finding himself called to report on the unfolding events and revisiting fond family memories, extends his stay. One century before, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, his ancestors made the reverse journey. As Carrere roams the Hotel Ukraina, increasingly perturbed by the face of Russia that the war reveals, he wonders about the one he had been raised to know.Just after the Second World War, Louis Carrere d'Encausse, a young Bordeaux bourgeois, and Helene Zourabichvili, a poor stateless young woman from a shattered Georgian-Russian lineage, married in Paris. Zourabichvili would make a career of the terrain she had left behind, becoming France's preeminent Russian authority. Drawing on her work and on his father's obsessive family records, Carrere writes a "true novel," one his mother would never have wanted, spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and taking us right up to the war in Ukraine.Clear-eyed, alert to the absurdity of truth, and alive to every shadow in a portrait, Carrere does what only Carrere can do: he turns genealogy into narrative velocity, archives into suspense, grief into an engine of thought. At once intimate and geopolitical, tender and ferociously intelligent, Kolkhoz is Carrere in full command: the master of the moral double take and the deceptively simple sentence.

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2024One of the London Times's Nine Best Literary Nonfiction Books of the Year"Extraordinary . . . Absolutely gripping." —Chris Power, The Guardian"Moving and masterful . . . [A] magnificent book." —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington PostOne of The New York Times' twelve books to read in NovemberA moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France’s leading nonfiction writer. Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history—featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris—was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness.V13 isn’t so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it—a city within the city, home to the innocent and the accused, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil—and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.

A sweeping fictional account of the early Christians, whose unlikely beliefs conquered the worldGripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrere revisits the story of the early Church in this extraordinary work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrere ferries readers through his "doors" into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith's founding.Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrere re-creates the world of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller, intertwining his own account of reckoning with the central tenets of the faith with the lives of the first Christians. Carrere puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and above all Saint Luke, charting Luke's encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity, and retracing his investigation of its founder, a then-obscure prophet who died under notorious circumstances.Boldly blending scholarship with speculation, memoir with journalistic muckraking, Carrere sets out on a headlong chase through the latter part of the Bible, drawing out protagonists who believed they were caught up in the most important events of their time. An expansive and clever meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion, and the ongoing quest to find a place within it.

"Justifiably considered the French In Cold Blood" (The Paris Review), The Adversary is a landmark work of true crime-and a deeply personal investigation of inexplicable evil. "On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting."So begins Emmanuel Carrere's unclassifiable masterpiece, now newly reissued. The crimes shocked France. For eighteen years, Romand's life was the model of bourgeois contentment. Peers admired him as a doting family man, a loving son who called his parents every evening, and a respected researcher at the World Health Organization.But those were all lies: Romand had never graduated from medical school or worked at the WHO. He spent his days wandering in the forest; he supported his family by defrauding relatives. When cracks appeared in his facade, Romand reacted in a way even he couldn't explain.Emmanuel Carrere is "widely understood as France's greatest writer of nonfiction" (The New York Times Magazine); The Adversary, his account of the life, crimes, and trial of Jean-Claude Romand, is his magnum opus.