The young man arrived in Paris, a refugee from political repression, just as World War I was sputtering to a close. He came with only a few coins in his pocket after sailing the world as a lowly deckhand, still a painfully shy twentysomething who stammered when he spoke in public. He moved into a dingy hotel on a cul-de-sac in Montmartre, falling into a demimonde populated by radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless and rebellious. When, half a dozen years later, he stole out of town on a train bound for the young Soviet Union, he had emerged as the fiery, passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a founder of the French Communist Party. In between had been years living under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments, arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo shops, revolutionary writing in the reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale, and meetings with Maurice Chevalier and Colette, all while being dogged by French spies--much of what we know about the young man's Paris years is thanks to near-total police surveillance of him, down to accounts of arguments he had with friends at home. Joseph Andras recalls Ho Chi Minh's early years and walks Ho's Paris neighborhoods. Searching for traces of the past in the streets of today, the author hears echoes of other angry histories, from terror attacks to tent encampments of the houseless to the protests of the Gilets jaunes. Ultimately this slim, intensely lyrical, and genre-bending book becomes a meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the the poor, the free, the outcast, and the rebellious--people who may or may not find a place in history books but without whom history could not be written.

A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day and sentenced to death by guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians. But what if the militant is a "pied-noir"? What if his lover is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust? What happens to a "European" who chooses the side of anti-colonialism? By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this debut novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by Le Monde as "vibrantly lyrical and somber" and by the journal La Croix as a "masterpiece".