La dame du jeu d'échecs

Description

It all begins with a photograph: one taken in 1922 of an Indochinese teenager, transformed into a living chess pawn. Having fallen in love with this portrait, which he discovered by chance in a collection of photographs from the colonial era, the author decides on a whim to go to Hanoi, eighty years later, in search of this woman. To try to discover who she is and unravel her enigma. From the hellish prison of Poulo Condor to the pagoda of the Great Goddess, from the Tet offensive to the rice fields of Son My, Philippe Charlier takes us on an intimate and moving journey to the heart of a tragic history: that of Vietnam.