“The Wound” by Laurent Mauvignier

“very far away there are reasons, connections, networks, invisible things working on us and we don’t understand a thing about them.” A small village in rural France in the early 2000s, some forty years after the brutal Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962. Bernard unexpectedly shows up at a party for his sister Solange’s sixtieth birthday and retirement. Four decades earlier, he had been drafted and sent to fight in Algeria before he was even old enough to vote. After the war, his life slowly fell apart. He married, had children, worked in a factory in Paris, and then, ten years ago, reappeared alone in this village where he grew up, refusing to talk about the past. He mooches off people and drinks too much. And now he has appeared at the party, all spiffed up, with an expensive gift for his sister that the whole village knows he can’t afford. Solange gets angry at him and people get testy. Suddenly he spies Chefraoui in the crowd, the head of the village’s only Arab family.…