Adios, My last session, Mr. Nostalgia, The Bouquinistes the titles of some of the books by Thomas Morales are enough to sketch the contours of a sensibility and a universe that Tendre est la province offers a new point of entry. If the writer has written novels, it is in “chronicler, sometimes carried away by the tenderness of the world before, sometimes irritated by the forgers of the new world“that he digs his literary furrow. Born in 1974 in Bourges, in the dying days of the Trente Glorieuses, Morales is one of those who have never really left the country of their childhood and adolescence. Claiming to have “a rear-view mirror in his head“In the course of his writing and his daydreams, he cultivates “old-fashioned pleasures”, like village balls, driving along the N7, watching a Philippe de Broca film or listening to a Claude Nougaro song.

His eulogy of the provinces, which is also a kind of modest autobiography, is nourished by a joyful nostalgia that rejects…