V13: Chronicle of a Trial

One of The New York Times' twelve books to read in November

A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France's leading nonfiction writer.

Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the ?le de la Cit? in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history--featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris--was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carr?re showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness.

V13 isn't so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it--a city within the city, home to the innocent and the accused, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carr?re introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil--and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 11/19/2024
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.60w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780374615703


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/07/2024
Booklist 11/01/2024 pg. 11

About the Author

Emmanuel Carrère, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Yoga, 97,196 Words, The Adversary, Lives Other Than My Own, and My Life as a Russian Novel, among other books. He lives in Paris.

John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov, The Kingdom, and 97,196 Words. He lives in South Korea.