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Almost fifty percent of Frenchmen believe they could “be homeless one day”, according to a survey carried out in November 2007. But what is the basis for this fear? That is the question this heart-stopping novel asks through the story of a former homeless person.

One day Lazarus leaves his marital home and ends up on the street. In a dramatic event one night in the summer of 2003, a mysterious “saviour” grabs him from the clutches of perdition, takes care of him in an idyllic rural location, then sets him up in a luxurious private apartment in the chic Seventh Arrondissement of Paris.
What’s happening to him? What are his benefactor’s motives? Is Lazarus really free to do as he pleases? Can he be seen as someone whose life has had its share of highs and lows, or simply as a “former homeless person”? Is his sense of other people’s contempt purely imaginary? Is there any possibility for equality between the rich and the poor? Can Lazarus ever escape his feelings of guilty, shake off his old demons and rebuild himself to love again?
This contemporary parable, depicted sensitively and realistically, testifies to the identity crisis gripping the middle classes.

In Jean-Marc Bastière’s hands, Lazarus, the resuscitated biblical figure, returns from a land where people are buried alive. How and when does the fall come? How do you get back out? How do you live afterwards? An unusual contemplation of the question of homelessness: this account is not about a down-and-out but about someone back in the land of the living in all their frenzied activity. And the realities of coming back to the “real”, civilised world are chilling.

This is writer and literary critic Jean-Marc Bastière’s second novel after Les anges d’à côté (Desclée De Brouwer, 2004). In 2009 Stock published the essay Ce n’est pas la pire des religions, which he co-wrote with François Taillandier.