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It is 1957, the savage Algerian War rages on. Captain André Degorce is reunited with Lieutenant Horace Andreani, with whom he experienced the horrors of combat and imprisonment in Vietnam. Captives now pass from Degorce's hands into Andreani's: one-time victims have become torturers. Andreani has fully embraced his new status, but Degorce has lost all sense of himself. He only finds peace when he is with Tahar, a commander in the National Liberation Army who is held in a cell that now acts as a confessional, the jailor opening up to his prisoner. 'This examination of the corrosive effect of torture as practised by officers of the French army during the Algerian war is brilliantly and movingly done' Allan Massie. Jérôme Ferrari was born in Paris in 1968, and worked as a professor of philosophy at the international lycée in Algiers for four years before moving to Corsica, where he has been teaching since 2007. He has published three previous novels. Geoffrey Strachan is the award-winning translator of Andreï Makine.