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“When I signed up for this website a year ago, the ad space was limited to one hundred characters. About me: Language student, tailor-made lover for cultured men, rates and photos by private message”. From disillusionment to resignation, the narrator of this novel has been sliding into an increasingly fragile existence: his family is distant, his father is ill, Grindr encounters come and go without leaving a trace, and precarious jobs barely keep him afloat. For the past few months, almost as an inevitable consequence, he has also begun prostituting himself. Everything changes when a portrait hanging above a friend's bed catches his eye. It's a black and white photograph by Peter Hujar. In it, a hunched young man sucks his toe and stares at the camera with a mixture of defiance and abandonment. As if the photograph held an intimate key, the narrator begins an investigation that will take him to the artistic New York of the 1980s, ravaged by the AIDS pandemic, and to a story that, little by little, will begin to offer him the answers he needs. Beneath an apparent lightness, Simon Chevrier's voice throbs with a restrained emotion that grows relentlessly until it leaves a lump in the throat. This captivating debut, winner of the Goncourt Prize for a first novel, establishes him as one of the most promising voices in French literature.