A moving hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France's leading non-fiction
writer ' 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 '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 On 13
November 2015 nine attackers wearing suicide bombs killed 130 people and left hundreds wounded
at sites in and around Paris in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War.
V13 was the code name for the much-awaited trial of these attacks. Lasting nine months from
September 2021 to June 2022 it consisted of 14 defendants 2 400 plaintiffs 350 lawyers and a
file 53 metres high. In V13 Emmanuel Carrère follows this landmark trial from its first day
to its last taking us behind the scenes to the lawyers survivors family members and the
defendants. He assembles in painstaking and subtle detail a human portrait of the crime - a
study of good and evil and the philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two.
Over the course of his career Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search
for truth in all its guises he dispenses with the rules of genre fusing passion curiosity
and a deeply humane intellect making him one of the most distinctive and important literary
voices today.
