Mathieu Lescure hasn't finished a single sentence in eighteen months. Then, at a flea market in the old town of Lyon, he buys a battered leather notebook for five euros — and that same night, for the first time in a year and a half, the words come.

He writes a murder. The next morning, a man's body is pulled from the river.

Certain it's coincidence, Mathieu writes again — and a woman he knows vanishes without a trace. As a determined police captain closes in and the notebook begins filling its own pages while he sleeps, Mathieu is forced to confront a devastating truth: the notebook doesn't predict the future. It reaches into whatever its writer is most afraid to admit — and turns it real.

Decades earlier, another writer discovered the same gift, and paid for it with everything he loved. If Mathieu can't find a way to give the notebook back before it claims its next victim, he will disappear too — the way Étienne Rouvière did, thirty years before him.

A hypnotic, atmospheric novel about guilt, inspiration and the stories we're most afraid to tell, set in the shadowed alleyways of Vieux Lyon — for readers who love their suspense literary, slow-burning and quietly devastating.