Philippe Besson

"Quand j'étais enfant, ma mère ne cessait de me répéter : ' Arrête avec tes mensonges. ' J'inventais si bien les histoires, paraît-il, qu'elle ne savait plus démêler le vrai du faux. J'ai fini par en faire un métier, je suis devenu romancier. Aujourd'hui, voilà que j'obéis enfin à ma mère : je dis la vérité. Pour la première fois. Dans ce livre. Autant prévenir d'emblée : pas de règlement de comptes, pas de violence, pas de névrose familiale. Mais un amour, quand même. Un amour immense et tenu secret. Qui a fini par me rattraper" -- Page of cover.

"Lucas's brother Thomas is dying. His blood platelet count has suddenly and catastrophically fallen, for reasons his doctors are finding hard to establish; on the Ile de Re in south-western France, the holiday home of their childhood, the two brothers wait for Lucas to die." "Lucas interweaves the chronicle of his brother's death with memories of their childhood and adolescence, their jealousies and rivalries, their unspoken bonds, beside which the wider world - parents, partners, friends - fade into relative insignificance. As those around them withdraw from this inexplicable, inexorable death, Lucas and Thomas retreat to their childhood paradise to wait for the end."--BOOK JACKET.

'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century'It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic and privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war and the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty and precocity captivate two men: Marcel, some thirty years his senior, a writer and celebrated socialite; and Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. Both relationships become love affairs of a kind - of the mind or of the body. Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer and far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, and Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel: in its daring in representing Marcel Proust as a character, in the beauty of its prose and in its delicacy of feeling. It is a quite remarkable debut.

"Une villa en Italie, le soleil trop fort, des ferries qui font la traversée vers les îles, une romancière qui peine à finir une livre, un jeune officier de l'Académie naval, un accident de voiture à des centaines de kilomètres, l'enchaînement des circonstances, la réalité qui rejoint la fiction, la fin d'un amour, le commencement d'un autre peut-être. ..."--Back cover.

Thomas, formerly husband an father, returns to his house in Falmouth on the british coast. From prison. In the meantime, his wife has left him taking all her belongings with her and leaving the house empty. Thomas returns there since he has nowhere else to go, not to seek paron from the citizens of Falmouth which continue to hold him reponsible for a crime. He lives in his empty rooms exluded by almost everyone.

"On a longtemps soupçonné Gaétan Dugas, un steward canadien, d'avoir été le premier homme à transmettre le sida : il était homosexuel et aimait les nuits fauves. Mais d'autres avaient contracté la maladie avant lui. Qui fut le premier, alors ?"--Page 4 of cover.