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A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France's leading nonfiction writer.
Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history-featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris-was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness.
V13 isn't so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it, a city within the city, home to the innocent and the guilty, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil-and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.
Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history-featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris-was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness.
V13 isn't so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it, a city within the city, home to the innocent and the guilty, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil-and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.
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Reviews
"Moving and masterful . . . [A] magnificent book . . . I wept many times reading V13 . . . Carrère commits everything to the page, omitting nothing, however unbearable. After 10 months, he is left with what he describes as "a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence." So, too, is everyone fortunate enough to read his extraordinary and generous book."
Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"The challenge posed by a trial as inherently dramatic as V13 isn't how to render it interesting, but how to traverse its morass of detail and sometimes contradictory defense testimony. The skill with which [Carrère] does so is extraordinary. In Carrère's hands it becomes a lattice of absorbing storylines . . . Carrère is ever alive to striking details . . . Absolutely gripping."
Chris Power, The Guardian
"To wonder aloud how something will affect him is a classic Carrèrian gambit: candid, tantalizing, rhetorically risky . . . [But] Carrère has always used his interest in himself to get closer to others. His insistent "I" is intimate, not imperial . . . [He] recognizes that the testimonies amount to something immense and extraordinary."
Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review