« Un ange aurait pu passer s’il y avait encore eu des anges. »


Dans Éloge des bâtards, nous suivons neuf personnages entrés en désobéissance. Face au pressant danger qui les menace, ils vont, contre toute attente et cinq nuits durant, remonter aux origines de leur propre histoire, et ainsi sceller entre eux de nouveaux liens.
Avec ce roman conçu comme une chambre d’échos, Olivia Rosenthal réhabilite la puissance empathique et subversive de la parole.



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From the outset the narrator, Lily, lives a supernatural phenomenon. One morning, in front of a fish stall, she was suddenly in total osmosis with the fishmonger, that she seemed to know everything about his existence. From then-on, she will have to manage this telepathic gift, the ability to read anyone’s mind. A vertiginous experience that will soon force her to restrain the effects of her strange power by limiting interactions with her peers. Fifteen years later, Lily lives in an area surrounded by towers and crossing expressways. To escape this dehumanizing environment, she got in touch with a small group of clandestine activists who try to counteract the imposing dictates of curfew and movement regulation by taking symbolic action. In all, they’re eight men and women. That is, until one day after Macha’s imprudence nearly failed them, the conspirators get together to re-strategize. But their debate takes an unexpected turn....
In Éloge des bâtards (Praise of Bastards) is a vast chamber of echoes, cross stories, and multiple biographies. With nine voices stimulating each other, this novel bears witness to the overwhelming legacy of bastard-ism and the atomi¬zation of our urban solitudes, but first and foremost tells of abandoned and marginalized children able to come up with solutions stemming from their unmet needs.



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‘‘ The author writes an outstandingly beautiful novel about the possibility of not obeying what is given as definitive and immutable. ’’

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