This is the story of Henri Juel, a man who, at sixty years old, is blissfully starting all over again. After randomly placing his finger on a map, he moves to the village of Versol and adopts a new way of life. At the café, he meets a wonderfully depicted array of local characters: the landlady, the mayor, and, most importantly, three
cynical men who discuss the unusually-shaped pebbles collected during their travels. Juel longs to join their inner circle and gets to work on his own remarkable stone collection. Captured by the writer’s mischievous
pen, he gets caught up in the game with the earnestness of a child. The illustrations that accompany the text, like the colour plates of a geology textbook, reflect this desire for a perfectly curated collection. Somewhere between fiction and a cabinet of curiosities, Le cercle is a real treasure trail. It invites the reader to open their eyes wide and, by the power of acute perception, transform the ordinary into the marvellous.