After a debut novel that won the 2022 Sport and Literature Prize (21 virages), Fred Poulet has written a bold, melancholic and political novel that confirms the emergence of a unique literary voice, capable of bringing together football, music, geopolitics and intimacy with rare accuracy.

In Paris, in the aftermath of Covid, the narrator is going through a personal breakdown caused by a brutal break-up, while working in a job as ‘chief happiness officer’ that is as absurd as it is symptomatic. To cope, he clings to sport—football in particular—as a vital rhythm, an embodied memory, a way of staying in the world when the present becomes uninhabitable. The story then unfolds across different eras and figures that make up the same trajectory. FC Mulhouse in the 1980s appears as a point of origin: that of youth, first desires, provincial stadiums and a love of fair play, where football shapes a way of being in the community and in the world. This formative experience permeates the narrator’s present and, decades later, finds an unexpected extension in the near future in Somaliland, where a woman—in her own way the heir to this story—in turn questions the meaning of work, transmission and commitment, while women’s football, connected and technologised, becomes a laboratory for the future. These three periods do not correspond symbolically: they recount the same fragmented life, its bifurcations, its gaps and its displacements. Through them, Cargo culte explores what football transmits from one generation to the next—a relationship to the body, to desire, to community, to filiation. When romantic, political and economic illusions crack, sport remains a precarious but essential refuge, capable of displacing loss and still producing common ground. Carried by a free, sensual and ironic language, the novel composes a contemporary meditation on what is transmitted despite everything — and on what continues to connect beings, eras and gestures.