V13: Chronicle of a Trial

One of The New York Times' twelve books to read in November

A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France’s leading nonfiction writer.

Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history―featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris―was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness.

V13 isn’t so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it―a city within the city, home to the innocent and the accused, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil―and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.