“With words that manage the feat of giving rhythm to nondescript days, Antoine Philias nicely incorporates lightness into the gray, volatility into the weary, and with assuredness joins the ranks of the strong discoveries of this rentrée. — Livres Hebdo

Elliot, almost 30 years old, has a father who is a truck driver, a mother who left a long time ago, a sister with the picture-perfect life, and a crutch after being injured in strikes against the retirement reform. It’s December 31, 2019 and he returns to the small city he grew up in. Where nothing happens. Lulu, almost 60 years old, is a cashier at Carrefour. Together, they aren’t going to change anything but they’re going to develop a close friendship.

To the rhythm of key dates in the life of a shopping center — Valentine’s Day, East, Summer, back-to-school, Halloween, Christmas — Plexiglass captures the daily routine of those who keep stores running. And these workers are catapulted to the front line during a year that didn’t do anyone any favors: 2020.

Antoine Philias writes about those people we overlook so easily but who are there, doing their job. And he delves into the friendships they make amongst each other when all they have in common is their work, and sometimes their loneliness.

Antoine Philias was born in Cholet, where his novel is set, in 1990. He currently resides in Rennes where he is a bartender. He co-wrote the children’s book Home Sweet Home with Alice Zeniter at L’école des loisirs (2019) and his first novel Stéréo was published by Équateurs (2021). He began writing Plexiglas at the end of 2019 when a Christmas spent in Cholet ended in the fall of 2021.