The Boy from Vientiane (en anglais)

It is Autumn in Paris, and Pierre is frankly bored. He is fifty years old and he has long since abandoned any kind of commitment to the relationship with his wife Hélène Grazziano-Benz, the promiscuous and media-obsessed president of the NGO Terre d'enfants (A Land for Children). His encounter with Laum, a young man from Laos, who seems shy, well-educated yet eager to learn, ambiguous yet determined, suddenly plunges. Born in Paris in 1960, Éric Miné, having studied Political Science, worked in the French capital in commercial and communication enterprises. A visit to Laos in the early 90's enabled him to discover for the first time the Far East. He was beguiled by the freedom and natural simplicity of human relationships which he found there and which are now largely absent in the West. He decided to settle there. In Laos he identified a kind of alchemy at work between this distant people and the French heritage which remained. It was a coming together which had somehow resisted all the vicissitudes of History. The author who remains passionately French, identifies for us, his readers, those elements contributing to this fusion.