Nicolas Mathieu, Our Sepia-Toned Summers

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to understand what it feels like to be seventeen. With almost cruel precision, Nicolas Mathieu recounts that age when we still confuse the desire to live with the desire to leave.

I read this novel in the blazing sun on my balcony, sweltering in the heat, with the sound of cars replacing that of the waves. I felt as though everything was clinging to my skin—the wind, my emotions, the world. And that’s exactly what this book conveys. *Leurs enfants après eux* is a novel that suffocates its reader through inertia.

Nestled in a slowly dying industrial valley, somewhere in eastern France in the 1990s, a group of friends searches for dreams to shatter and bodies to desire. And among them is Anthony. He grows up amid derelict wastelands and stifling routines, caught between idleness