Fred Hamster and Mrs Lilac
Fred Hamster et Madame Lilas
Little Fred, called Hamster‚ can’t stand the sight of blood. On black pudding days, he would prefer playing the trumpet rather than being made by his butcher father to run around to the slaughterhouses in the back of the two-horsepower family car. Or better still, he’d prefer to spend time with his girlfriend Lilac – sorry, Leïla – an older woman of
twenty-eight and the prettiest woman in the neighbourhood. But that too is frowned upon. It’s 1962 and the clamour of war in Algeria has reached as far as Little Belgium, a one hundred percent working-class area in the flat north country…
A highly colourful portrait of working-class France right at the start of the sixties.
Until now, in three novels and a collection of short stories, Philippe Delepierre has devoted himself to noir. He is also a professor of literature in a secondary school.
The author of Les gadoues, and of Crissement sur tableau noir published in 2005, Philippe Delepierre is a teacher of literature in a secondary school near Lille.
About
Prix RTL-Lire 2004
« Hilariously cheeky humour, a child’s voice, naive and lucid at the same time, give this novel just the right tone to express a child’s world in the face of adulthood, to describe a working-class environment and a bygone age, without television, where the only images were those one dreamed of a better tomorrow. » Figaro Magazine