In a true and empathetic debut novel, Rémi David reconstructs the love story and mutual fascination between Jean Genet and a young tightrope walker.

When Jean Genet met Abdallah, to whom he devoted a kind of homage in his famous essay "The Tightrope Walker," he was 44 and the young man barely 18. Genet was immediately dazzled by the charming young Algerian man who'd worked for several years as an acrobat for Pinder's circus. He conceived a mad undertaking: to make Abdallah famous. His agility and circus experience should enable him to become a peerless artiste. But how to remain, in the eyes of one's lover, the tightrope walker, the revered angel, the miracle fashioned by a poet's own hands... after the fall?