The Safe House
A Novel
Published on 5. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-0-226-84916-4 (ISBN)
Description
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, Etienne 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, Etienne 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.
When the Nazis came, Etienne 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, Etienne 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.
Reviews / Votes
"What comes through in this short, smart, funny book is bravery and toughness, especially that of his grandmother, who in a world of imaginary and real terrors kept the family safe and together." * Publishers Weekly, starred review * "Complex and meticulously plotted; this mystery house full of odd characters will make the reader consider storytelling as the building of a physical and mental space." * Kirkus Reviews * "Moving through the house, room by room, chapter by chapter, the book takes us progressively deeper into a family mythology that is grim and, at times, almost surreal." * The New Yorker * "Elegant, highly visual, alternatingly airless and soaring on the wind of inspiration, Boltanski's intimate tale, gracefully translated by Laura Marris, walks a tightwire between darkness and light, melancholy and joy." * ForeWord Reviews * "An engrossing narrative streaked with the dreads, routine strangeness, desperate attachments, issues of identity, challenges of displacement, strategies of survival, and ultimately, hunger for living that typified the Boltanski family. This is a story about history--familial, personal, tribal, national. More specifically, the telling is vivified by the impulses that history evokes, one of which is to reanimate history itself--which perhaps is why Boltanski calls this book a 'novel.' His attuned Anglophone translator, Laura Marris, says the work 'exists in a borderland between truth and fiction, the kind of space where definitions of genre sometimes force a divide.'" -- Ron Slate * On the Seawall * "The Safe House is well crafted and ingeniously structured. Christophe Boltanski is a superb stylist, moving with ease, always seamlessly, between different times and various places. Despite its claustrophobic appearance, the novel is quite spacious and emblematic in telling a story of historical horror, displacement, and human struggle for survival." -- Ha Jin, author of The Boat Rocker "Maybe every memoirist, meditating on the past, inevitably writes fiction, but Christophe Boltanski's entrancing novel walks the high wire between memory and imagination with exceptional grace, wit--and deadly force. A brilliant, moving, and entirely original work of art, which is to say a work of truth, as if a century, rather than a man, had written its memoir." -- Patricia Hampl, author of Blue ArabesquesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Illustrations
10 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 214 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
306 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-84916-4 (9780226849164)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Christophe Boltanski is an award-winning journalist who reported for Liberation from London, Jerusalem, and the Gulf War. The Safe House is his first novel. Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her recent translations include Albert Camus's The Plague, Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark, and Geraldine Schwarz's Those Who Forget. She is the author of The Age of Loneliness, her first solo-authored book. She lives in Buffalo, New York.
Content
Car
Kitchen
Office
Parlor
Staircase
Apartment
Bathroom
In-Between
Bedroom
Attic
Acknowledgments
Translator's Note
Translator's Acknowledgments
Kitchen
Office
Parlor
Staircase
Apartment
Bathroom
In-Between
Bedroom
Attic
Acknowledgments
Translator's Note
Translator's Acknowledgments