Éric Vuillard turns his forensic, darkly humorous eye to the build-up to the war in Vietnam - skewering French and later US politics to show the prelude to the end of the colonial period.

Éric Vuillard is a writer and filmmaker born in Lyon in 1968 who has written nine award-winning books, including Conquistadors (winner of the 2010 Prix Ignatius J. Reilly), and La bataille d'Occident and Congo (both of which received the 2012 Prix Franz-Hessel and the 2013 Prix Valery-Larbaud). He won the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for L'ordre du jour (The Order of the Day), and he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for The War of the Poor.