Rights sold to: Bulgaria (Pulsio).

It is in the imaginary Latin-American republic of Costaguana that the writer B. Osborn is buried. Like each year, his widow Aurelia undertakes a long journey to visit his tomb, which is in the Indian lands. There, she is supposed to meet with a German professor who claims he can reveal certain things about her late husband’s past.
Yet others tempt to rip off the mask of “the century’s most secretive writer:” Rebecca Hamilton, an American woman who was Osborn’s last love; Thomas Ahorn, the German professor who is a specialist of Salinger; Wagenbach, an old anarchist exiled on an island in the Baltic Sea; Aguila Mendes, a young, ambitious and unscrupulous journalist. And even Alfred Hitchcock, who was said to have tried to adapt to the screen one of the novels of the mysterious writer, with the disconcerting Kim Novak. Each narrator applies him- or herself to recompose the puzzle of a life built on deceit.
Yet Osborn keeps slipping away. Director of an anarchist magazine in Berlin, ethnologist in the jungle, owner of a hostel, literary agent… he spreads confusion and stays elusive, with multiple identities.
Inspired by B. Traven, author of the enigmatic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Osborn is a fascinating character, some kind of adventurer who chose to go underground. Beyond the entrancing investigation tracking down his hero, Éric Faye wonders about the effacement of the writer behind his works, and about the impossible biography.

Éric Faye was born in Limoges in 1963. He works for the Reuter’s Paris office. Author of short stories as well as novels, he has published Croisière en mer des pluies (1999), Les cendres de mon avenir (2001), La durée d’une vie sans toi (2003), Mes trains de nuit (2005) and Le syndicat des pauvres types (2006) at Stock.