It's ten past two in the morning. Emmanuel takes out an envelope he knows he'll never send, and begins writing to the father he hasn't seen in thirty years.
A Letter to My Father is a novel about absence - and everything an absence can pass on, whether we want it to or not. Between a child's memories of searching for his father's face in other men, an adult's panic at being kept waiting, and the man Emmanuel became with no one to show him how, this letter written in the dead of night slowly follows the thread of a wound older than he is.
But something, in that silent house, seems to answer. A trace of cold cigarette smoke. An object that moves on its own. A dream too precise to be only a dream. Between grief and something else, the novel never quite decides - it lets the reader sit in the same uncertainty as its narrator.
Inspired by the original song by BLVG 1977, A Letter to My Father is a short, intense novel about forgiveness that repairs nothing yet sets you free - and about the chains we can choose to break, one generation at a time.
A letter you never send may be the only honest letter anyone ever writes.