Francois Vallejo knows more and more where he comes from and seeks less and less to know where he is going.

Geographically and as his name suggests, he is at the intersection where travellers from the South and the non-nomads from the West meet. The only path he insists on following is that of the novel, which is for him a shortcut.

He has explored some ten unique itineraries, since Ruckus in the Ballroom in 1998.

Madam Angeloso and Groom constituted a few steps, followed by Travels of Great Men, which led him to Italy in the 18th century, before arriving at West in the 19th in 2006, and then the 20th with The Brelan Sisters.

These historical detours helped him to find his way in the 21st century, the Metamorphoses of which he tried to shed some light on in 2012. He took them further in Blossom and Blood in 2014, where two periods intertwine, two histories confront each other, and men and women are interlaced in time.

His insatiable appetite for all books prompted him in 2016 to write a novel where hunger competes with food, and tasting with devouring: A Dangerous Pleasure, a feast he’d like to share.

Hotel Waldheim 2018 allowed him to jump back in time and to go back to the period of his adolescence. The reason? An anonymous postcard which would unsettle his life. The narrator discovers a handwritten and, to say the least, sibylline message… “Remind you of sumfing?”.

For Vallejo, on life’s secret roads and through the novels he discovers as they unfold before him, the pleasure of leaving surpasses the joy of arriving.