Our selection of 3 powerful novels on family secrets and intimate injuries

“Immortals”, by Camille Kouchner

Difficult to open this first novel by Camille Kouchner without thinking of The Familia Grande, Released in 2021, shock testimony on incest suffered by his brother on the part of their stepfather, the political scientist Olivier Duhamel, and with the stupor that these revelations had aroused in the Parisian intellectual landernau.

Immortal is a fiction, but the context in which the intrigue is located is almost similar: parents sixty-eights imbued with freedoms that they have granted themselves and which do not make much of their offspring. Like K., fifty -something, who from his hospital bed, gathered his memories, nested in those of Ben, his milk brother within a dysfunctional family. Everything reviews: moments of joy, but above all dangerous games, addictions, sexual and sexist violence, toxic relationships … that well-being refuses to see. Rollic, passages from this necessary story read in apnea.

Our opinion: PP

Immortals, by Camille Kouchner, ed. of the threshold, 224 p. ; 20 €.