Three Days and a Life

September 1, 2017
A chain of strange and sorrowful events is set in motion in the French town of Beauval when lonely 12-year-old Antoine Courtin angrily whacks his adoring 6-year-old neighbor, Remi, in the head with a branch--and, to his great shock, kills him.The incident takes place in the woods, where Antoine was fuming over the shooting and heartless disposal of Remi's dog by the boy's father after it was struck by a car. Gripped with the fear of being thrown in prison with vicious murderers, Antoine pushes Remi's corpse into a deep crevasse, runs home, and waits for the police to come and arrest him. That they only want to question him about the boy's disappearance leaves him no less panic-stricken. When twin cyclones hit the provincial town, ripping roofs off homes--and threatening to expose Remi's body--the natural world itself seems incited by the killing. Flash forward a dozen years, and Antoine, never nabbed for the crime, has settled into a "normal" life as a doctor who is engaged to be married. But the curse of Beauval strikes again after he sleeps with a local woman, the love object of his youth, and she demands that he marry her. A short, delirious novel, this latest effort by the author of Alex (2013) and Blood Wedding (2016) may remind some readers of the macabre scenarios of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. No one is writing quirkier thrillers than Lemaitre, who gets inside the head of his unhinged protagonist with wicked delight while capturing the madness of the modern world.French favorite Lemaitre's novel, about a preteen on whom fortune smiles in the most devious ways after he accidentally kills a little boy, is a feverish, wickedly entertaining work.

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September 18, 2017
Lemaitre’s searing novel of psychological suspense rests on a terrible tragedy: in 1999, in the French village of Beauval, an angry 12-year-old, Antoine Courtin, hits a little boy, Rémi Desmedt, with a tree branch, accidentally killing him. Terrified, Antoine hides Rémi’s body and is wracked with guilt as the people of Beauval desperately hunt for the boy they believe was stolen by a stranger. Twelve years later, Antoine has settled in Paris, where he’s a successful doctor working in humanitarian aid and engaged to be married, though he’s still haunted by what he did to Rémi. On a reluctant visit back to Beauval, a sexual encounter with a childhood crush and news of local redevelopment threaten to destroy his carefully constructed life. From Antoine’s inner torment, Lemaitre (Blood Wedding) devises an unusual page-turner, driven not by the cause-and-event of incident but the push-and-pull of guilt and memory, which spins toward a final revelation that leaves the reader with stark questions about punishment, culpability, and the psychic consequences of long-held secrets.