Publisher's presentation : 

August 1992. A valley lost somewhere in the East, blast furnaces that no longer burn, a lake, a hot afternoon. Anthony is fourteen years old, and with his cousin, to kill boredom, he decides to steal a canoe and go see what happens on the other side, on the famous bare-ass beach. At the end, it will be for Anthony the first love, the first summer, the one that decides all the rest. It will be the drama of life that begins.

With this book, Nicolas Mathieu writes the novel of a valley, of an era, of adolescence, the political story of a youth who must find his way in a dying world. Four summers, four moments, from Smells Like Teen Spirit to the 1998 World Cup, to tell the story of lives at full speed in this France of the in-between times, of medium-sized towns and suburban areas, of the countryside and concrete urban development zones. The France of Picon and Johnny Hallyday, of funfairs and Intervilles, of men worn out by work and lovers faded at twenty. A country far from the counters of globalization, caught between nostalgia and decline, decency and rage.