The tenderness

"Al-Raqa" is a novel based on lived human reality, combining the routine of life and its strange coincidences in a beautiful narrative style. The novel "Al-Raqa" by French writer David Vinkinos is one of the novels that received a great echo in Europe, winning literary awards in France and in more than one European country. After being translated into several languages, David Vinkinos uses advanced and special storytelling techniques, some of which appear in short chapters that pass like parenthetical sentences between events, presenting something, such as words of a romantic song remembered by the heroine and sung with her former lover/husband, or using it in a strange and surprising way to display the components of the meal requested by the lovers while sitting in a restaurant for the first time, through a scene full of emotional tremors and tense events, aiming to place the reader at the heart of the event as if he is sitting with the characters of the novel and tasting the same meal and singing the same song with them. The story revolves around Natalie, a beautiful Swiss girl, and François, a young man she meets by chance on the street, falls in love with, marries, and they live together for seven years of bliss. The loving couple succeeds in creating their own utopian world, enjoying continuous happiness that is not interrupted by any sign of misery, until their ideal city suddenly collapses, and by another coincidence, when François dies in a car accident.