Lucie Taïeb

Capitaine Vertu

Captain Vertu

August 25, 2022
Novel
160 pages
140 × 180 mm
9782377561391
978-2-3775-6139-1
																Lucie Taïeb, Capitaine Vertu
																Lucie Taïeb, Capitaine Vertu

Is putting on Captain Virtue’s cop costume enough to escape your past?

In France, Laure Vertu, a police captain, resigns after more than ten years of active service in the anti-fraud brigade. Written in lucid prose, Captain Virtue is a short and dream-infused noir, in which Lucie Taïeb takes hold the police genre to all the better subvert it. Hard boiled and hallucinatory, she offers a kind of feminine Bartleby who stands in stubborn opposition to the “world as it is”, to its violence, its denials, its compromises, and its false hopes.

The author

Lucie Taïeb was born in Paris in 1977. She is a teacher and researcher and has published texts in reviews, essays (Territoires de mémoire, Les Classiques Garnier, 2012), two short story collections (Tout aura brûlé, Les Inaperçus, 2013, La retenue, LansKine, 2015) and several translations from German (Cruellement là, by Friederike Mayröcker, Atelier de l’Agneau, 2014). She won the 2019 Wepler Prize for Les échappées.

Strong points

After Les échappées and Freshkills, Lucie Taïeb portrays a cop who has all but given up

What role can we play in a society where any notion of justice seems to have disappeared?

A thriller rich with tender yet cruel irony

August 25, 2022
Novel
160 pages
140 × 180 mm
9782377561391
978-2-3775-6139-1