The Empty House - Goncourt Prize 2025

In 1976, my father opened the house he had inherited from his mother, which had been closed for twenty years.
Inside: a piano, a chest of drawers with chipped marble, a Légion d'honneur, photographs with a face cut out with scissors.
A house full of stories, where two world wars, the rural life of the first half of the twentieth century, but also Marguerite, my grandmother, her mother Marie-Ernestine, her mother's mother, and all the men who gravitated around them, intertwine.
All of them marked the house and were gradually erased.

I tried to bring them back to light to understand what their story might have been, and its shadow cast on ours.