a brother

David Thomas

Éditions de l’Olivier, 144 pages, 2025

🏅Longlisted for the Prix Goncourt 2025

🏅Longlisted for the Prix Fémina and Prix Fémina des Lycéens

🏅Longlisted for the Prix Wepler - Fondation de la Poste 2025

Why you should take a look at it?
√ A deeply human perspective on mental illness
√ A powerful exploration of grief and memory
√ A reflective and artful narrative

In this profoundly moving memoir, author David Thomas confronts the long, painful trajectory of his brother Édouard’s life under the shadow of schizophrenia. This is not merely a biography or a clinical account of mental illness; it is a brother’s elegy, an attempt to reconstruct and reconcile the fragments of a life altered and ultimately undone by an insidious condition.

The story begins in grief, with Édouard’s sudden death—a shock that reverberates through David’s memory and compels him to revisit the decades that came before. Édouard, once vibrant and full of potential, gradually became a stranger, consumed by an illness that replaced the person David once knew with a ghost-like presence. Schizophrenia is portrayed not just as a medical diagnosis, but also as a quiet, creeping force that isolates and obscures, rendering Édouard both physically present and emotionally distant for almost forty years.

As David retraces the arc of their shared childhood and brotherhood, he confronts the complexities of loving someone lost to a mental illness. The memoir is filled with emotional descriptions; the bright, vivid moments of their youth stand in stark contrast to Édouard’s later years.

Thomas asks himself how to tell this story truthfully, how to tell the truth without turning pain into performance. His reflections are both literary and philosophical, and this memoir becomes a form of communion, a last conversation with a beloved brother whose voice was long ago silenced by a devastating illness.

David Thomas is the author of several novels. His latest book, Partout les autres won the 2023 Goncourt Short Story Prize.