In true friendship, like in true love affairs, the effect continues even after the object is gone. After he left Switzerland, Sebastian’s every movement was still affected by Clara. He hadn’t managed to win her heart. Once he started studying law at the Sorbonne, he dedicated his Parisian victories to her.

Twenty-five years later, Herman devotes his writing to the memory of the one-and-only, the magnificent Sebastian. Because as long as the memory of his old pal shines in his personal galaxy, the narrator of this novel will feel alive.

Barely an hour from the International Tribunal in The Hague, he delves into his friend’s letters and diaries in order to try to reconstitute the high point of his youth. When pub crawls and friendships born of music alternated with less cheerful concerns. In the 1990s, when the War in the Balkans was in the headlines, the orphan Sebastian met his uncle for the first time… and the latter tried to give him a dangerous object from his father.

All these pages are really about just one thing: Sebastian’s disappearance.

David Boratav presents the chronicle of a disappearance. In limpid, solar prose, he paints the portrait of youth in search of meaning and adventure.