The narrator, a young man from a provincial town, arrives in the big city to go to a very selective school. There, he will discover a new loneliness and a ruthlessly competitive world. One day, a somewhat fragile student breaks down in the middle of a class, insults the teacher, storms out of the room and steps over a railing.

One Winter in Paris has all the charms we’ve come to expect from Jean-Philippe Blondel’s novels: complex relations; a breakdown followed by a reconstruction – at a price; an attraction to both death and life; emotional confusion; success born of a misunderstanding; pleasure in the shadow of pain; resentment in the shadow of happiness.

The author’s three geographical compass points – the provincial city of Troyes, Paris and the moor-like Landes region – all appear in this novel. This book is in a similar vein to Et rester vivant ('And Stay Alive'): the hero-author-narrator has the same wildness, the same pure raging desire – to stand up to the world despite an almost dilettante attitude.

A young man from the provinces moves to Paris. His coming-of-age story.