About the Book

November 13, 2015. It was a Paris night that began like so many others—until a series of terrorist attacks brought darkness to the City of Light. Stirred by the tragic events at the Bataclan music club, One Night in November locks into the hearts and minds of all those whose paths crossed that fateful fall evening…

A rebellious teenage girl in the throes of a crush. A middle-aged man eager to chase away his buddy’s blues. A young gay student rejected by his father, but discovering himself. Two new parents in need of a date night. They went out seeking love, laughter, and music—and then the world fell down around them.

Using intersecting narratives, award-winning author Amélie Antoine choreographs the shocking attack and its aftermath, from grief and devastation to hope and healing.

My Thoughts

I requested this book from NetGalley when I saw in on there because I’m really drawn to books about trauma at the moment, as I work through the remaining aspects of my own PTSD. I find it helps me to read how others have found ways to live with it, to recover from it or just how they’ve coped.

One Night in November is a work of fiction that looks at characters that became caught up in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. Amelie Antoine takes a real cross-section of people from all walks of life and, as such, makes this such a believable and heartbreaking read.

The book really drew me in quickly. Knowing what happened that night in Paris at the Bataclan meant there was a real sense of apprehension reading about these people – so much so that when I started reading I had completely blanked on the fact that this book is a work of fiction and I believed I was reading true accounts. It became clear in the second section that this is a novel and I found it very unsettling. This is a very difficult book to read, especially with the attack being so recent, and I had to put the book down quite a few times to gather myself. The descriptions are graphic at times, and very believable and this made me really uncomfortable because it felt so real. I wasn’t sure when I finished reading if this was a book I would be able to review.

To be fair to the author though her writing is engaging and she does hook you in very quickly. Her exploration of how fear affects different people and how we might behave in such an extreme situation is well done. I’ve had people say to me about my experiences that led to my PTSD that they wouldn’t have coped as well as I did but the fact is that none of us know how we’ll cope until we’re in it. We might think we’ll be brave and actually we freeze, or we might think we’d never cope and we find reserves we never knew we had. I do think the author captured this quite well. There is a sense of how people begin to make sense of what they’ve survived in the aftermath too and, for the most part, I found this interesting. She looks at survivor guilt; at the way some people feel a sense of how short life is and go on to live at million miles an hour; at the way some people just can’t seem to function, can’t seem to cope with what normality is anymore. I appreciated her looking at this in the way she did.

This is a very powerful and incredibly moving book and ultimately, I did really appreciate the author’s beautiful and engaging writing style and will look out for more of her books in the future.

One Night in November is out now.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

About the Author

Amélie Antoine’s bestselling debut novel, Interference, was an immediate success when it was released in France, winning the first Prix Amazon de l’auto-édition (Amazon France Self-Publishing Prize) for best self-published e-book. In 2011, she published her memoir, Combien de temps. One Night in November, written as “a call to remember,” is her second novel. Antoine lives in northern France with her husband and two children. Maren Baudet-Lackner grew up in New Mexico. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans, a master’s in French literature from the Sorbonne, and a master of philosophy degree in the same subject from Yale, she moved to Paris, where she lives with her husband and children. She has translated several works from the French, including the novel It’s Never Too Late by Chris Costantini and the nineteenth-century memoir The Chronicles of the Forest of Sauvagnac by the Count of Saint-Aulaire.