Passing through Bordeaux, the city of her birth where growing up meant wanting to escape and whose bourgeois opulence and arrogant amnesia has remained a thorn in her side, Anne-Marie Garat visits an exhibition devoted to the slave trade at the Musée d’Aquitaine. She is stopped in her tracks by a description on one of the panels that seems to whitewash the shocking reality.

Humeur noire captures the anger that welled up at the sight of these ill-chosen words. Dissecting with humour and lucidity her own obsessions as a writer, Anne-Marie Garat serves up an extraordinarily personal (and extraordinarily life-affirming) book about a collective history and private memories that for too long have remained unexamined. Conspiratorial, vibrant, sparkling and virtuosic, it is an expression of anger that crystallises the extent to which everything is linked and everything is important.