The stories from the famous Malossene cycle are built in the style of an adult comic: they always include crime, daring sexual scenes, injuries incompatible with life, and miraculous healings.
At the end of each book, the Malossene family is replenished with a new baby. Now Pennac decided to expand this line deeper into the novel itself rather than outward— not to invent the story of the birth of a new child, but, retrospectively, to tell the secret of the birth of the little kid we’ve known for a long time, Benjamin’s younger brother.