the pleasant surprise of the Alter-Goncourt of the Figaro Littéraire-Grand Véfour prize

This article comes from “Figaro Magazine”

I used to hate missing a night out; Today, I hate to miss a good book. It must be a question of age: I have the FOMO* letters. Last month, a group of drunken but credible colleagues (Babkine, Bloch-Lainé, Cabana, Jeancourt-Galignani, Lamberterie, La Rochefoucauld, Liger, Montety, Neuhoff and Ungemuth) awarded their “Goncourt” Literary Figaro to Gabriella Zalapi for Ilaria . I felt crappy for never having heard of their favorite back-to-school book.

I rushed to buy this third novel by an Italian Swiss woman (like my wife). It's the story of a little girl kidnapped by her father in the 1980s. They toured Italy by car for two years. It looks like the pitch for a Dardenne brothers film, with a hand-held camera and actors playing unemployed people, before posing on the red carpet in a Dior suit. The daughter is the victim, the father a bastard: the spectator is caught…