A Former Far-Right Militant Writes a Novel for Teenagers About How He Got There
Nicolas Destobbeleire draws on his own adolescence — bullying, an abusive father, a slide into racism and violence — for "Le Pays des pères," a young-adult novel reviewed by Télérama.
Télérama has reviewed "Le Pays des pères," a novel aimed at readers aged 14 and up, written by Nicolas Destobbeleire, who describes drawing on his own past as a young man drawn into the French far right.
According to Télérama, the book follows a teenager who is bullied at school and mistreated by his father, and who finds in the ultra-right a sense of belonging that pulls him into racism and violence. Destobbeleire, the outlet reports, uses the novel to take apart from the inside the rhetoric and arguments that once seduced him.
Télérama frames the book as addressed specifically to adolescents, a group often targeted by far-right recruitment online, and presents it as a rare case of a young-adult novel built on a first-person account of radicalization and the road back out of it.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
