Aurore and Solange are sisters. Émile married Aurore when he got back from the war in Algeria. Their three narratives become intertwined, slipping apart at times, over a backdrop of a war being lost, a war whose reverberations are still troubling their lives. The book’s epigraph is a statement by General Aussaresses, drawn from an interview published in the newspaper Le Monde in May, 2001, in which the military man admitted for the first time that the Army did indeed use torture in Algeria.The statement, which finally confirmed what everyone already knew, revives buried memories in an imaginative narrative in three voices. Émile sadly observes Aurore’s mental and physical deterioration, as a disease gradually takes her memory away from her. We will be able to read the journals Aurore kept at the onset of her disease: whole stretches of life become detached from the present, dizzily toppling into the distant, absent past. Her sister, Solange, is trying to understand the past that has wounded her. The family home acts as an eyewitness to these internal conflicts, to their secrets, which remain profoundly marked by the closes ties between them, despite life choices that kept them apart. This text questions the paths our lives take: the ones we chose, the ones that are forced upon us. Why leave your little village in the country to defend a land that isn’t yours, to kill guys just to obey orders? How do you survive the unthinkable atrocity that is war? When the world is in chaos, should you withdraw into silence or march for a cause? Those are the questions that studded the existences of the three characters, who have become strangers to each other, in their own way.

Aurore and Solange are sisters. Émile married Aurore when he got back from the war in Algeria. Their three narratives become intertwined, slipping apart at times, over a backdrop of a war being lost, a war whose reverberations are still troubling their lives.