Book Nook - What You Need From the Night

 

In this dazzling debut, What You Need From the Night (On Sale: Oct 3, 2023), Grand Prix du Premier Roman recipient Laurent Petitmangin offers a magnificent, intimate study of grief and radicalization that grapples with the uncomfortable, and devastating experience of being tethered to loved ones we no longer recognize.   Set in the East of France within a left-leaning, working class community, a father raises his two sons alone after the death of his wife. His bond with Fus, the eldest, and Gillou, the younger, is noticeably close, grief and love holding them together. When Gillou decides to move away to Paris to pursue higher education, his father and brother support him fully; their town does not offer much opportunity for growth. But everything changes when the father discovers that Fus has been hanging out with the local right-wing group, contrary to his socialist upbringing. Though he joins mostly for the camaraderie, the group’s activities soon lead to violent outcomes.  Shame and incomprehension soon pervade their daily lives, as Fus and his father must reckon with life under a shared roof. What common ground can a father and son find when everything seems to tear them apart? An unexpected tragedy will force them to find an answer.  Short, sharp, and ultimately heartbreaking, Laurent Petitmangin’s What You Need From the Night spotlights the lives that are unfolding in forgotten corners of the country, and how the far-right lures in young people just looking for community—sometimes to devastating ends. A moving portrait study on paternal love and familial relationships, generational and political differences that interrogates the belief that many take for granted: is love truly unconditional?

About the Author: Laurent Petitmangin was born in 1965 in the east of France into a family of railway workers. He works for Air France KLM. He has received numerous literary prizes in France for his writing, including the Prix Femina des lycéens, the Prix Stanislas, the Grand Prix du premier roman, as well as numerous readers’ prizes. What You Need from the Night is his debut novel.  About the Translator: Shaun Whiteside has translated more than fifty books from German, French, Italian, and Dutch, including Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997.