Antonin Varenne was born in Paris in 1973. He spent only a few months there before being taken by his parents to live in the four corners of France, and then on a yacht. He returned at the age of 20 to study at the university of Nanterre.

After completing a Masters in philosophy, specializing in “Machiavelli and the political illusion”, he left university and became a building climber, lived in Toulouse, worked in Iceland and Mexico and, in 2005, laid his hat at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains where he decided to put pen to paper for his first story. After returning to France with an American woman, a bilingual child and a Mexican dog, he settled in Creuse, in central France, where he dedicates his time to writing and building timber frame houses.

“Antonin Varenne, to whom we owe the excellent Fakirs, puts all the resources of his keen sense of the written text, and his free and refined writing to the service of a novel which should ordain him as one of the new voices of the French novel, crime fiction or not.” Alain Nicolas, L’Humanité.

You have been warned.