"In 2006, a French Muslim citizen of Ivorian descent kidnapped and murdered, in particularly gruesome circumstances, a French citizen who was Jewish by religion. I call the first one Yassif and the second one Eli. One is 25 years old, the other is 23. I have reconstructed the events with my imagination, in order to create a literary work, a fiction. I was only interested in their logic, their implicit meaning: what they tell us about the evolution of our societies. After all, what is an 'event'? In this case, the media produced a bunch of fictional variations: the gang of Barbarians. From a somewhat different perspective, my book belongs to the genre of the novel. Let's call it a 'story'."

This is how Sportes introduces a narrative based on real characters and terrifying events that took place in the suburbs of Paris. A narrative that is read with bated breath, a narrative that describes the how and why of the concentration of immigrants in Europe and their difficult survival in a world that rejects them, willingly or unwillingly. We are experiencing and will continue to experience the sad and expected consequences.

A book that should be read in schools.