Contemporary literature

Some books are not merely read — they pass through us. “Passagères de nuit” by Yanick Lahens is one of those. When you set it down, you are left with the uncanny sense of having inhabited other bodies, breathed the air of another century, carried on your own shoulders the weight of a life you had never imagined from the inside. This is literature's peculiar power — surpassing cinema, surpassing the image — this gift of making us walk in another's skin, of rendering us, for a few hours, almost...