This little novel takes on some big issues: the intersection of race, gender, and class that results in a mass murder in a small French town. Told in a matter-of-fact style, the novel explores how one man perceives the arrival of an outsider as the beginning of the end of what little dignity and self-regard he has left. He does what he knows how to do to try to restore his world as he understands it, but nothing ultimately suffices but his own rough justice, administered in an incomprehensible explosion of violence. Samira Sedira seems to be saying that it is this need to “restore order”—or at least a particular order rooted in retrograde ideas about what is right and fair—that gets us in trouble, when what we ought to be striving for is restoring one another’s humanity.