Used book – Attaquer la terre et le soleil - Prix Inter 2023, Mathieu Belezi

2023 Prix Livre Inter and 2022 Le Monde Literary Prize!

Praised by critics for twenty years but still unknown to the general public, Mathieu Belezi delivers a masterful novel with *Attaquer la terre et le soleil*, embodying the madness and hell of the colonization of Algeria in the 19th century.

*Attaquer la terre et le soleil* recounts the destiny of a handful of settlers and soldiers caught in the forgotten hell of Algerian colonization in the nineteenth century. And in a brief novel, it is the entire experience of a writer that suddenly crystallizes and upsets, a voice haunted by Faulkner that gives itself.

For more than twenty years, Mathieu Belezi has been building a surprisingly coherent novelistic work, with sculpted sentences. The musicality that strikes from the very first lines of *Attaquer la terre et le soleil* echoes *Le Petit Roi*, his first novel published in 1998 by Phébus. As for its theme, it obviously refers to his great Algerian trilogy, published successively by Albin Michel (*C'était notre terre*, 2008) and Flammarion (*Les vieux Fous*, 2011; *Un faux pas dans la vie d'Emma Picard*, 2015). Is it the constancy of this journey that explains the brilliance of this new novel? Written in a few months, *Attaquer la terre et le soleil* in any case portrays with a tragic beauty, through the voices of a woman and a soldier, the madness, the hell, that this colonization was.