A journalist's main task is to tell stories of everyday life, of major and minor events, because the world is made up of stories.

The twenty short stories collected here focus on the intertwining of news events with the personal lives of individual men and women. The narratives cover such varied subjects as a family's search against the backdrop of 9/11, the risks taken by a reporter during the Louisiana hurricane, how a young woman's life is disrupted when she becomes the centre of media attention, the anxieties brought on by a major sports event, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the emotions it elicits, the pathos of a homeless person.

Such tales are the stuff of life. They grip us and thrust us into a bizarre world where nothing is entirely real and yet everything could be true. Thomasson has elaborated a sort of fictional journalism, casting a new light on news events. And when he makes reality veer toward the bizarre, he makes us gasp in horror.

The result is a potent mixture of fiction and journalism.

Bernard Thomasson is a journalist and the associate editor-in-chief of the French all-news radio station France Info.