President of the Court Jean-Louis Perry asks the accused Salah Abteslam: “Name of father and mother?” “The names of my father and mother have nothing to do with it. – Profession; – Fighter of the Islamic State. The President looks through his notes and politely says: I see: seasonally hired.

The calendar is September 8, 2021, and the focus of the world is not on the pandemic, but on the Île de la Cité courthouse in Paris. There and for the next nine months – as long as a pregnancy, writes Emmanuel Carrère – the trial of the jihadist terrorists who shed blood in the Bataclan in 2015 took place. Among the journalists present at the historic trial was Emmanuel Carrère for L’ magazine Obs.

From September 2021 to July 2022, Carrère briefed readers of a French magazine about what is happening in court.

Every week, from September 2021 to July 2022, Carrère told the readers of the French magazine about the lawsuit. In the end, the author collected his texts and transferred them to the book “V13”, recently published by Twenty-First, translated by Giorgos Karambelas.

As in his previous books, Carrère dives into his subject and in this journey, with many emotional twists and turns, ups and downs, he takes the reader with him from the first page to the last. We don’t just follow the progress of the case, the testimonies of the victims – the survivors and parents of the 131 who died in the attack – the testimonies of the defendants or the purchase of civil suits and defense lawyers. With a penetrating and thoughtful gaze, Karer recreates faces that have been lost, lives that have been cut in half, love, dreams, the broken daily lives of those who survived but became ghosts of their former selves. At the same time, he tries to trace the reasons that prompted the jihadists he sees before him to choose the path of no return and lead to the death of dozens of people, either directly – only one of the original group survived the attacks – or indirectly, maintaining a peripheral role (some of them also went through via Greece in 2015). Between these two worlds are small details of the agenda: journalists sitting in a room, a broken coffee machine, drinks in a nearby bar. Emmanuel Carrer creates a chronicle where emotion and horror meet sensuality.