Locked in his solitude and haunted by the painful memories of his childhood, a man remembers. Childhood is not always a lost paradise. It may be, quite the contrary, a world made up of injustice and frustration. And what is more terrible for a child than to be neglected by a mother who so adores the elder brother, and to be the whipping boy for an admired female cousin. In fragments, and without pathos, the past returns.A poignant and disturbing novel in which the reader witnesses from the inside a mechanism that pushes a simple being to fatal madness. When he finally meets a woman, a person who is more unhappy and weaker than he, he decides to help her. But up to what point?A great observer of the depths of the human soul, Yasmina Khadra explores the hidden sources of madness. Or how solitude, the lack of love, the turning in on oneself, are so many forms of suffering capable of making a man mad. And how a particular circumstance, a noise, a squeaking gate, like the sun that dazzles Camus's stranger, can unleash an irreparable act.Alone in his mother's country house, he remembers. The discovery of his murdered father in the stable when he was five. His fascination with the burial of the dead in the cemetery. His awkwardness. His silence, uninterrupted. The mad, possessive love of his mother for his elder brother, and her indifference to him, the youngest. And cousin K, so beautiful, so brilliant, so spoiled, and so cruel, a child, witness to his mother's lack of love. His tormentor.Now, he scarcely has any hope remaining, no one from whom he can try to attract love. He lives without knowing why he came into the world nor why he will have to leave it. He has no more expectations.Until the evening when he sees a woman, her hair in disorder, in tears, thrown out of a car by a man. Finally, a creature more unhappy, weaker than he, for whom he may be able to make himself useful. He must do something for her. It is a necessity. He