Primera sangre

On the first page of this book we find a man facing a firing squad. We are in the Congo, in 1964. That man, kidnapped by the rebels along with fifteen hundred other Westerners, is the young Belgian consul in Stanleyville. His name is Patrick Nothomb and he is the future father of the writer. Starting from this extreme situation, Amélie Nothomb reconstructs her father's life before that moment. She and she does it by giving it a voice. So it is Patrick himself who narrates his adventures in the first person. And so we will know about his father, a soldier who died in some maneuvers due to the explosion of a mine when he was very young; of his mother detached from him, who sent him to live with his grandparents; of the poet and tyrant grandfather, who lived outside the world; of the aristocratic family, decadent and ruined, who had a castle; of hunger and hardship during World War II.