V13: Chronicle of a Trial

by Emmanuel Carrère

Overview

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 Île de la Cité 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 Carrère 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 guilty, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374615703
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/19/2024
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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, author of East West Street and The Last Colony

"Emmanuelle Carrère has written what will surely be remembered as a classic account of the Paris attacks trial, one that is rigorous and admirably self-effacing. Yet as heartbreaking as V13 is, Carrère never succumbs to despair, or to a seductive pessimism about France's future: his book is 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, author of The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

From the Publisher