Publisher's presentation :

Il est des hommes is a dark novel, in the sense that it aims to say something about the social world, its harshness, its madness, its barbarity. A novel that confronts the forces of evil, that tells of a devastated childhood, of injustice, of AIDS, of drugs, of violence in a Marseilles ghettos between the 1980s and 2000.
The narrator, Karel, is a boy from the northern districts. He grows up in the Antonin Artaud ghetto, a fictitious ghetto backing onto the Etoile mountain range and flanked by a shanty town, passage 50 , inhabited by sedentary gypsies. Karel lives with his sister Hendricka and his little brother Mohand, who is disabled. They try to survive their childhood, between abuse, drug addiction, parental poverty, and institutional indifference. The novel opens with the murder of their father. The three children will each invent a destiny for themselves. Karel wonders: Who killed my father? And fantasizes about the life he could have led if he had been born under a lucky star, if he had had less deviant and less abusive parents. He wonders if he has not been contaminated by violence, if he is not the repository of a legacy both tragic and pathetic, which would lead him to damage people as his father did. He looks after his little brother and sees his sister succeed in a career in the cinema. 
It is also the novel of Marseille, before the MUCEM and before the disappearance of the Plaine market, which constitutes the sentimental geography of the book. And it is a novelistic dive into a whole popular culture whose energy and emotions the author captures through the songs of the time, from Céline Dion to Michael Jackson, through IAM, Cheb Hasni, Richard Cocciante or Elton John.