A trace that can be checked against its origin.
Provenance makes it possible to examine a trace. Better-documented evidence increases the responsibilities of those who use it.
Cycles, Series & AnthologyThere are four of them in the photograph. They all remember a fifth. Sorting through old summer-camp slides, Maud Lenoir rediscovers the summer of 1996: the windbreakers, the games, the lake. And an absence that makes no sense. She is not the only one who remembers this child. Other adults carry the same missing piece, with details they thought belonged only to them.
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Cycles, Series & AnthologyEvery case file promises the impossible. Most fail to deliver it. At the Lhomond Center, photographs, recordings, and accounts arrive laden with hope. A detail seems impossible to explain. Then a copy surfaces, an old question returns, a date changes what a piece of evidence means. Under the Séverac name, the files also tell the stories of those who agreed to open them.
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Cycles, Series & AnthologyIn the 1912 portrait, someone has disappeared beneath the scissors. In Camille Vallet’s family, the frame has always been there. They knew the faces, the places, the story passed down with the picture. But a cut turns the portrait into a question. Then an intact photographic plate reveals a fifth woman: the one the family had stopped seeing.
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Cycles, Series & AnthologyThe notebook is missing. The word it contains is already drawing too much attention. In the archives, Nora Delmas knows a label, a piece of string, or a reference number can say what a document does not. When a notebook linked to the earliest traces of APODYOPSIS is stolen, the search quickly outgrows the missing object. Who consulted it? What was copied? Why has this artifact become so desirable?
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Cycles, Series & AnthologyParis, 1882. Before anyone can understand the impossible, its witnesses must be kept from disappearing. Letters, séances, unsettling accounts pass through the hands of people trying to distinguish trickery from what resists explanation. But preservation means more than stacking documents. A family wants an artifact withdrawn. A name puts someone at risk. Evidence already has a price.
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Cycles, Series & AnthologySeven seconds were enough for the world to hear what the measurements had not yet proved. In Shanghai, Lin Qiao searches for signals, errors, and results that can withstand scrutiny. When an anomaly attracts attention, the language races ahead: some are already talking about another world. In the laboratory, the task remains harder than that phrase suggests.
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Crime, investigation & psychological thrillersIn the photograph, Claire is asleep. She has never entered that room. Room 214 has a certain light, a bed, details too ordinary to look like a trap. Yet the picture shows Claire Morvan in a place absent from her memory. To understand it, she would have to find the hotel, the witnesses, the moment the photograph was taken.
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Crime, investigation & psychological thrillersMadeleine remembers a murder. The victim appears in no file. When Madeleine Vasseur arrives at the police station with a notebook and a photograph, she asks them to look for a man. For Captain Inès Delcourt, the case could end there: no missing-person report, no identifiable victim, and a memory weakened by illness.
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Crime, investigation & psychological thrillersEveryone in the village knows the victim. The records do not know his name. In Iceland, an investigation runs up against an impossibility that looks nothing like forgetting. The villagers remember a man, his gestures, his place among them. Yet the official traces that should confirm his existence are missing precisely where they should be.
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Institutions, medicine, justice & politicsHe is not lying. Yet the crime he describes does not belong to this world. His testimony is precise, coherent, sustained by a conviction no contradiction can dissolve. For Maud Delmas, Luc Varenne, and Adrien Charras, it opens a case in which they might believe a person without being able to accept what he claims.
Open the novel ↗An archive you encounter. Each reader receives only one version.
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