Set in Corsica, Ferrari’s second novel has two stories, those of Marcel Antonetti and his grandson Matthieu, wrapped around each other in a literary helix and linked together at crucial points by St Augustine’s preachings on the sacking of Rome in AD410.

At the end of one of those strands is a barmaid, Hayet, packing up her things and disappearing into the night, leaving the bar’s owner to find someone else to run it. Local lads Matthieu and Libero decide to drop out of their philosophy course to take it over, much to their parents’ disapproval. Under their management, the bar turns a profit and becomes the coolest place in town to hang out. But being big fish in a small pond just leads to a narrowing of Matthieu’s and Libero’s horizons, to the point that, scheduled to take a holiday in Barcelona, they reach the airport only to turn back and go home.

The story of two young men with a venture that’s heading for an unavoidable collapse runs in parallel with Matthieu’s grandfather Marcel’s reflections on his early life. Marcel was conceived just after the First World War, which marked the end of one world but, as far as Marcel is concerned, the expected new world never arrived. His bold future never materialising, Marcel is scarred by the early death of his young wife and a bitter disappointment at the loss of the French colonies, which he takes remarkably personally. The bar is, of course, a metaphor for France’s empire, but more widely for all empires, which are destined inevitably to fall.

Winner of France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and the English PEN Award, this is a subtle and multi-layered novel which rewards close reading. As befits a Paris-born professor of philosophy, Ferrari’s sentences are long and often take turns into the deeply contemplative. But he can go from hushed solemnity – the introduction, for instance, in which Marcel studies a photograph of his family taken before he was born and considers his absence from their lives – to the raucous humour of a ruined bar manager getting drunk and sharing intimate details of his sex life with an uncomfortable captive audience. Both extremes work, because, for all the other points Ferrari is trying to make, his narrative is anchored by the weight of a community consisting of generations of families and their love, grief, joy and despair.