Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Safe House

The Safe House

Boltanski, Christophe
Marris, Laura

Paperback

General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 0226849163
ISBN13: 9780226849164
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Jun 5 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.55 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In Paris's exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story.

When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever--anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion's recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat.

That house (and its vehicular appendage) is at the heart of Christophe Boltanski's ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room--each chapter opening with a floorplan--introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator's grandmother--a woman of savage appetites--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. The house was a palace, Boltanski writes, and they lived like hobos. Rejecting convention as they'd rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself.

The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France's most prestigious book prize. A French-language film adaptation, La cache, was released in 2025 from director Lionel Baier. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.

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Literary Fiction

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