L'Étranger

Le Lambeau is Philippe Lançon's autobiographical account of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. Through personal and intimate reflections, Lançon recounts being a victim of the terrorist attack and the subsequent nine-month hospitalization; about his life, which will forever be marked by that day and will never be the same again. In November 2018, the novel received the Prix Femina and two days later the Prix Spécial Renaudot (France's largest and most prestigious literary prizes). The magazine Lire has unanimously described Le lambeau as the best-written book of 2018. Baptiste Liger, director of Lire, believes that Lançon's overwhelming literary reconstruction of the terrorist attack possesses such power that readers will undoubtedly be affected by its poignant existentialist bliss, which Lançon manages to embrace and convey to the fullest.