What do you think?
Rate this book


From one of France’s most talented young authors, an urban thriller full of rage and raw emotion
In a small town just like any other, a police identity check goes wrong. The victim, Saïd, was fifteen years old. And now he is dead.
Mattia is just eleven years old, and witnesses the hatred and sadness felt by those around him. While he didn’t know Saïd, his face can be seen all over the neighborhood, graffitied on walls in red paint, demanding “Justice.” Mattia decides to pull together the pieces of the puzzle, to try to understand what happened. Because even the dead don’t stay buried forever, and nothing is lost, ever.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 18, 2016
‘welcomed so warmly at the station that he ended up telling himself it wasn’t so serious. And the law merely confirmed that feeling…He ended up convincing himself that it really was self-defense, that he’d had no choice.’
‘the reason it’s come to this isn’t because a teenager was killed, or even because his murderer wasn’t punished. It’s because nobody spoke up. When a police officer is killed by a delinquent, he’s mourned, salutes are fired in his memory, he’s decorated, and even ministers file past his grave with tears in their eyes. When a delinquent is killed by a police officer, the silence is deafening.’
‘Our struggle for justice demands much more than any single indictment. It cannot be litigated, legislated or bought into existence. And there is no amount of money that could make up for the lives and human dignity lost to police and state violence against our communities. Instead, if we are to truly honor the magnitude of the injustice, we must commit ourselves to nothing less than the complete transformation of society.’