Kaddour Hédi Livres

Au printemps 1922, des Américains d'Hollywood viennent tourner un film a Nahbes, une petite ville du Maghreb. Ce choc de modernité avive les conflits entre notables traditionnels, colons français et jeunes nationalistes épris d'indépendance. Raouf, Rania, Kathryn, Neil, Gabrielle, David, Ganthier et d'autres se trouvent alors pris dans les tourbillons d'un univers a plusieurs langues, plusieurs cultures, plusieurs pouvoirs. Certains d'entre eux font aussi le voyage vers Paris et Berlin, vers de vieux pays qui recommencent a se déchirer sous leurs yeux. Ils tentent tous d'inventer leur vie, s'adaptent ou se révoltent. Il leur arrive de s'aimer. De la Californie a l'Europe en passant par l'Afrique du Nord, Les Prépondérants nous entraînent dans la grande agitation des années 1920. Les mondes entrent en collision, les etres s'affrontent, se désirent, se pourchassent, changent. L'écriture alerte et précise d'Hédi Kaddour serre au plus pres ces vies et ces destins.

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London, and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, find themselves in Hédi Kaddour's Little Grey Lies. Once lovers, but now friends, Max and Lena travel with Lena's new man, Thibault, and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing. An aging war hero, Strether seems to Max to be his best chance at a story, but as the two men talk, it seems Stether may not be who he says he is and the old soldier's past begins to trouble Max and Lena as they crash forward through memories and truths not theirs. As in his other work, internationally renowned poet and novelist Hédi Kaddour offers shifting time-frames and kaleidoscopic viewpoints in a mannered metafictional thriller that bears comparison to both Robert Coover and John Le Carré. Little Grey Lies is historical suspense at its best.