Offenses — Constance Debr, Paperback

An account of flawed justice, based on the true story of a murder in a housing project outside Paris.

He is guilty, yes. He is guilty of having yielded, of not allowing himself to be crushed. He is guilty of not having been reasonable, of not having stayed in his place, the one that was his. To have disturbed the order of things…

Ten stab wounds. An old woman in a pool of blood. A nineteen-year-old neighbor now a murderer.

Since publishing her first novel in 2018, Constance Debr’s work has exposed the flaws in the social order with dizzying passion and intelligence. Her first-person trilogy–Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name–describes the trajectory of leaving a comfortable bourgeois life as mother and wife employed as a criminal justice attorney to become a writer and lesbian. Her books radically challenge all received ideas of the couple, motherhood, family, and inheritance.

In Offens