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  • Published: 19 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781911717058
  • Imprint: Fern Press
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

V13

Chronicle of a Trial





A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France’s leading non-fiction writer

On 13 November 2015, nine attackers wearing suicide bombs killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded at sites in and around Paris in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War. V13 was the code name for the much-awaited trial of these attacks. Lasting nine months, from September 2021 to June 2022, it consisted of 14 defendants, 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers and a file 53 metres high.

In V13, Emmanuel Carrère follows this landmark trial from its first day to its last, taking us behind the scenes to the lawyers, survivors, family members and the defendants. He assembles, in painstaking and subtle detail, a human portrait of the crime – a study of good and evil, and the philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two.

Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre, fusing passion, curiosity and a deeply humane intellect, making him one of the most distinctive and important literary voices today.

  • Published: 19 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781911717058
  • Imprint: Fern Press
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Emmanuel Carrère

Emmanuel Carrère, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a Sunday Times bestseller and New York Times Notable Book, translated into twenty-three languages), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life as a Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov (winner of the 2011 Prix Renaudot), The Mustache and, most recently, The Kingdom.

Also by Emmanuel Carrère

See all

Praise for V13

An affirmation of life, of survival, of the bonds of community and solidarity that allow us to rebuild in the aftermath of shattering violence

Adam Shatz

Forensic and troubling, deeply humane, utterly gripping, a book of singular importance for our times, on law as story and life, superbly rendered for the reader in English

Philippe Sands

Not since Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann has a book laid bare the political and moral scaffolding of our times with such commitment and intelligence

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Impelled by a tolerant mind’s desire to confront the intolerable, V13 is an utterly riveting account of one of contemporary Europe’s darkest nights – and its anguished aftermath – by a French literary colossus

Rob Doyle

V13 is a work of profound moral imagination and inquiry. It is a dazzling book by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time

Katie Kitamura

Brilliant. Clear-eyed, wise and compelling

Paul Murray

An unforgettable book, a document of violence and dignity like no other, a work of such humanity and generous contemplation that it functions as a tribute to the value of testimony itself

Megan Nolan

A gripping testimony of terror and loss . . . the strength and humanity Carrère brings out makes for a reading experience that is at once humbling and invigorating

Observer

Carrère has . . . forged an extremely readable story out of a dizzying amount of information

New Statesman

Compelling and richly rendered . . . Carrère is one of the most exciting and formally innovative of current non-fiction writers

Guardian

It is hard to imagine a book emerging that will manage to be more informative, moving or likely to last than Emmanuel Carrère’s V13

Spectator

Magisterial . . . It's a reminder of humanity, and its frailty

Sunday Telegraph

Extraordinary and generous

Washington Post

Extraordinary . . . A lattice of absorbing storylines . . . Absolutely gripping

Chris Power, Guardian

Carrère’s icy, disclosing style is a marvel . . . In this marvellous and terrifying book, Carrère convinces us that good is not just morally better than evil. Good is actually more interesting than evil, and a harder philosophical problem to solve

Will Lloyd, Sunday Times

A curious but compelling mix of dramatic reconstruction, psychological deliberation and personal reflection

Economist

Emmanuel Carrère [is] quite possibly France’s best non-fiction writer… [V13 is] a masterpiece

New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

I’ll read anything by Emmanuel Carrère, a roving intellectual with a curious mind . . . A powerful read

The Times, *Books of the Year*
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