-A bestselling novel about growing up in the Paris projects in the 1980s.

-35,000 copies sold out of a first print run of 40,000.

Samuel is a French boy, half-Jewish, half-Gypsy, growing up in the now infamous projects outside of Paris just after their construction. In the first of a five-volume series, he tells the story of his childhood through funny and nostalgic portraits of the lives and preoccupations of his neighbors. The poor stingy old man on the first floor who refuses to help finance the construction of a new elevator; the woman who tries to commit suicide from her apartment window (whom he and his buddies console and save), the feuding husband and wife on the fourth floor; the gang fights in the buildings’ stairwells and corridors. Growing up in those high-rises at a time when “three or four stars still remained visible” from the rooftop, Benchetrit’s characters are not the hate-filled gangs we would have beeen led to expect. Yet the problems are the same: racism, unemployment, neglect, drugs, violence, and crime. Never sad or dispiriting, these chronicles are a slice of everyday life that brings to mind such authors as Charles Bukowski, John Fante and Richard Brautigan.

“You feel the night falling softly outside above electric suburbia. There’s not a sound. Just that eternal rumbling that exists only here. The silence of the projects is a different kind of silence. It’s a silence filled with sound. Listen to the roaring silence and close your eyes. Your dreams will always be of asphalt, my little Bench. Asphalt and neon.”