BEL-AIR

A moving novel of adolescence, friendship and love,
of wasted youth,misunderstandings and the passage
of time.

On the outskirts of a small town in France in the 1950s, two friends, Gérard and the narrator Franck, live in the working-class housing project of Bel- Air.Once as close as brothers, over a period of four years, the two boys grow apart. Gérard, the only son of café owners, a racist fascinated by guns, d reams of serving his country in A l g e r i a . As fo r Franck, raised by his mother after the desertion of his father, he hopes for nothing more than freedom. A new world opens up to him, thanks to Mr. Louis, a civil engineer crazy about jazz, and Cathy, the girl he falls in love with.When Franck receives his call-up for military service at the front in Algeria, he decides to do a break-in and run away with Cathy. But the police catch him red- handed: he will spend the next fifteen years behind bars. Forty- five years l a t e r, Franck has contented himself with the undemanding job of hotel night-watchman.With the housing project about to be demolished, F r a n c k returns one last time to settle old scores with the one who surely betrayed him. It's then that Gérard reveals it was Cathy who, caught by her parents with suitcase in hand, was the cause of his arre s t . She was sent aw ay to the south of France where she had had his child. In this short but touching novel, we once again find the style and themes close to the heart of the author of “The Return of Jim Lamar”: coming of age, brotherhood and loyalty, racism and war, social conditioning and the thirst for freedom. Through a simple well- conceived style, the reader is swept along right from the first page, anxious to discover the story of this moving narrator. Lionel Salauen lives in Chambéry where he was born in 1959. In order to devote his time to writing , he worked a string of jobs, f rom warehouseman or aquariumm maker to sardine fisher in Sète. A devotee of the blues and of American cinema, and fascinated by geography, he has chosen to set his first novel on the banks of the M i s s i s s i p p i . His first novel , Le Retour de Jim Lamar, won many awards in France, including the Télégramme's readers ' prize and the SGDL's Thyde Monnier Prize.