Ap. J. C.

Rights sold to: Bulgaria (Kama), Italy (Crocetti), Romania (Trei), Russia (Limbus)The story starts today, in Athens, with 89-years-old Nausicaa asking her lodger, a student, to investigate the monks of the Mount Athos. Is she planning of bequeathing her fortune to them? Is she looking for the brother that disappeared fifty years ago? In spite of his lack of interest for ancient history and the pre-Socratic, the young man accepts the mission. His investigation takes him very far away, one thousand years back, at the time when the first monastery was built, and even further in the Antiquity, when the Mount Athos was first inhabited. He discovers that there are martyrs amongst the Gods of the Olympus thanks to a Christianity that imposed itself through centuries of destructions and massacres. He meets increasingly singular characters: a journalist for whom an orthodox mass is a work of art, a historian who claims that Christianity does not come as the continuation of the Antiquity but follows it like 'night follows day', a defrocked monk, a Peruvian poet who lives on the Sacred Mountain, the members of a strange community established near Salonika whose rituals include dancing on burning coal twice a year. He comes into contact with a French monk, the owner of a house in Normandy where the abbot Prévost wrote Manon Lescaut, and with a mad mystic who greets passing planes with a Byzantine flag. He discovers an extremely wealthy community that yields great power on the political life of the country - a community which no-one dares investigating and which privileges no-one thinks of contesting. Ap. J.-C. is a book on Ancient times that has a lot to tell us about our present and future.Vassilis Alexakis has been living between Paris and Athens since 1968. He has published fifteen books including Talgo, Paris-Athènes, Avant, La langue maternelle (awarded the Prix Médicis), Les mots étrangers and Je t'oublierai tous les jours.