Simon Chevrier’s literary debut, awarded the 2025 Goncourt Prize for first novel, establishes him as one of the most outstanding new voices in contemporary French literature.
“With raw and disarming sincerity, the lucid and unvarnished prose of this first novel moves through its refusal to seduce […]. Simon Chevrier will need to be closely followed.”
Philippe Jean Catinchi, Le Monde
“When I signed up on this website a year ago, the ad space was limited to one hundred characters. About me: Language student, tailor-made lover for cultured men, rates and photos by private message.”
Between disappointment and resignation, the narrator slips into an increasingly precarious existence. Family is far away, the father falls ill, encounters through Grindr follow one another without leaving a trace, and temporary jobs barely allow him to get by. For a few months now, almost as an inevitable consequence, he has begun to prostitute himself.
Everything changes when a portrait hanging over a friend’s bed catches his attention. It is a black-and-white photograph by Peter Hujar. In it, a young man bent over sucks his toe while holding the camera’s gaze between defiance and abandonment. As if the image hid an intimate key, the narrator begins an investigation that will lead him to the artistic New York of the 1980s, marked by the AIDS crisis, and to a story that will start to offer him unexpected answers.
Beneath an apparent lightness, Simon Chevrier’s writing moves forward with restrained emotion that grows relentlessly until it causes a lump in the throat. An intense and precise debut that portrays emotional fragility, desire, and the search for meaning in a generation suspended between survival and memory.
