Deni Ellis-Béchard at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival: "Entre immersion et distance, comment raconter un monde?"

Assigned to write an exposé on one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo. His harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints.

When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man and an extraordinary family story.

When a car explodes in Kabul ten years after 9/11, a journalist discovers that its passengers—three fellow ex-pats—had formed an unlikely love triangle. As the journalist learns more, the narratives of their lives become inseparable from the story of America’s imperial misadventures.

How are bonobos like us, what can they teach us, and how can we save them? Combining elements of travelogue, journalism, and natural history, this incomparably rich book takes readers deep into the Congo to examine these great apes and the people who have dedicated their lives to protecting them.

A family curse, a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship, causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. In assured and mystically powerful prose, this novel follows generations of the family across North America and through the twentieth century.