An Honourable Exit

Excoriating and profound … A remarkable work … I cannot think of an Anglophone author who writes with such polemical, poetical indignation * Scotsman *Clever and scathing * Le Temps *Absolutely spectacular * France Info *Pages clenched like fists ready to strike. It is the eternal war of the powerful against the weak that Vuillard stages in each of his books * L’Obs *Sparkling … By his pen, historical figures become beings of flesh and blood; we hear them breathe, we see them sweat * L’Histoire *The challenge for Vuillard is to tear the rancid nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ of the colonies, for the chic, elegant, confident and honourable colonial France, to pieces * La Croix *

Éric Vuillard is a writer and filmmaker born in Lyon in 1968 who has written nine award-winning books, including Conquistadors (winner of the 2010 Prix Ignatius J. Reilly), and La bataille d’Occident and Congo (both of which received the 2012 Prix Franz-Hessel and the 2013 Prix Valery-Larbaud). He won the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for L’ordre du jour (The Order of the Day), and he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for The War of the Poor.