On Friday 13 November 2015, Islamist terrorists wearing suicide belts and carrying butcher’s knives and Kalashnikovs killed 130 Parisians in about twenty-eight minutes. Their targets were a rock concert at the Bataclan Theatre in the 11th arrondissement, the terraces of four nearby cafes and the Stade de France, where the French and German football teams were playing. Nine of the attackers were killed by the police or blew themselves up. V13 is an account of the trial of the one surviving terrorist and thirteen associates, based on the reports filed by the writer Emmanuel Carrère for the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in the autumn of 2021 (‘V’ stands for Vendredi and ‘V13’ was the police codename for the investigation into the attack).

In a postscript, Carrère’s editor at Le Nouvel Observateur celebrates the fact that his court reporter was also the author of The Adversary, a classic account of how a monstrous liar and fantasist murdered his wife, his children and his parents, and then (in a French prison) joined a Catholic prayer group. That book was notable for the skill with which Carrère re-created the thickening membrane of falsehood and unreality that encased the killer – to the point where the murder of everyone he loved seemed to be the only logical course of action. 

Carrère follows the same approach in V13, meticulously reconstructing the world from which the terrorists emerged. Molenbeek, the crowded village in the centre of Brussels that has become the centre of European Islamism, was the home of ten of the twenty-three terrorists involved in the attacks. Under the