CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Like a Child
Playing Alone
FORMAT: 150 x 220
PAGES: 195
WORDS: 55 000 approx.
ALL RIGHTS AVAILABLE
PUBLICATION DATE: March 2019
PUBLISHER: La Trace éditions
The Work
“Why are you so hard?” This unexpected remark from a homeless man makes 37-year-old Barnabé Raphaël wonder about himself.
Giving up the trappings of the perfect social climber and shattering his fine career, he sells his Paris studio to go back to the ocean of his childhood, and step back in time. Raphaël thus sheds the “hard rhino skin” this is shutting in his dusty old self and becomes a wanderer again.
Helped by Mathilde, an old friend of his maternal grandmother and the last witness to his family history, he sets off in search of his past, retracing the footsteps of his whole family. From now on he feels an awesome presence, and relearns how to talk to things with the joy and openness of a child or poet.
He travels a road strangely scattered with signs that spur on his fate, where his path seems to converge with that of the woman he meets at the end of the journey, one who might love his.
The Author(s)
After Des Mots de Contrebande (Smuggled Words), Alain
Cadéo returns to a romantic style with Comme un enfant qui joue tout seul (Like a child playing alone). As a demanding and rigorous seeker of roads that lead off the beaten track, he is a perpetual and soulful traveller who sets out to meet the Other and find truth and fairness on the way.
Here is a remarkable man who is sincere, and generous, just like his writing.
Key Sales Points
– Here is a wizard with words who delivers beautiful sentences with rich, poetic and striking rhymes, and descriptions of sights, sounds and smells. Clever, well-crafted and fluid writing, set at a pleasant place.
– Every sentence questions the reader’s own paths and choices. Would we be brave enough to give up everything and follow this path and the outcomes it leads to?