Laurent Petitmangin

Ainsi Berlin

Berlin

October 7, 2021
Novel
224 pages
120 × 200 mm
18,90 €
9782358878005
978-2-3588-7800-5
																Laurent Petitmangin, Ainsi Berlin
																Laurent Petitmangin, Ainsi Berlin

Ainsi Berlin, Laurent Petitmangin’s second novel, confirms the author’s immense talent for probing the nuances and contradictions of the human soul.

The war has just ended. In the rubble of Berlin, Käthe and Gerd set out to build the new world they had fought for. They imagine a programme in which the children of the intellectual elite, removed from their families and raised free of sentimentality, will form a generation of superior individuals ensuring the future of East Germany. But as the wall goes up, a woman in the West has different ideals and dreams of renewal. Liz, an American architect, intends to do everything she can to defend the values of the Western world. When Gerd meets Liz, the strength of his convictions begins to waver...

With his hero torn between two women, tossed about by History, standing halfway between the opposing faces of Berlin, between two worlds, the author depicts a duel between feelings and ideals, an eternal fight against oneself.

The author

Laurent Petitmangin was born in 1965 in Lorraine in a family of railway workers. He spent his first twenty years in Metz and then left his home town to pursue higher education in Lyon. He returned to Air France, a company for which he still works today. A great reader, he has been writing for about ten years. Ce qu’il faut de nuit, his first novel published in the autumn of 2020, was a huge critical and public success in France and abroad, immediately establishing the author as one of the voices to follow on the French literary scene. Ainsi Berlin is his second novel.

Strong points

An author who has won a huge critical and public success with more than 20 literary prizes, awarded the Prix Femina des lycéens, the Prix Stanislas, the Grand prix du premier roman, as well as numerous readers’ prizes.

A novel that resonates with Ce qu’il faut de nuit through common themes (fatherhood, conflict between feelings and political convictions…).

A vibrant text on the sentimental wanderings of a man.

October 7, 2021
Novel
224 pages
120 × 200 mm
18,90 €
9782358878005
978-2-3588-7800-5