Lucy, a young lawyer, is on fast track to partnership in her firm. Arnault, a convicted felon, leaves prison after two decades through a piece of evidence in his favor. The two of them come together during a rescue operation at the centre of Paris, and then they go on with their separate lives.

Months later, their paths cross again at a camp for migrants on the edge of Paris.

The Man Without Shelter by Indrajit Garai is a novella about a man who has been exonerated after twenty years in prison and his life on the outside on the streets of Paris after all these years.

Arnault is released in the middle of the night when an order comes through from higher above for his immediate release after DNA evidence overturns his conviction. He hasn’t been outside for twenty years. His family and friends never visited him so he has no one he can turn to and even the clothes he arrived at the prison in don’t fit him anymore.

Arnault is a character I found myself rooting for. Being convicted and held for twenty years for something you didn’t do and having your friends and family turn their back on you for the same reason must be a hard and bitter pill to swallow. Then on the outside, you have nowhere to go, you don’t know the city you lived in anymore and you can’t even get a job with no ID, abode, etc. Life has been very cruel to him, yet he was quite a tough young man with a good set of morals and a determined mind.

We also meet Lucy, a lawyer, who is looking for Arnault to give him his papers. Lucy is a very head-strong young woman who just wants to help Arnault.

The story is quite philosophical and deep and as such for a novella I found it a challenging but intriguing read. I love that the book didn’t look down on those who were living in the streets, in migrant camps etc.

Overall, with themes of homelessness, migrant camps, injustice, violence, and Parisian back streets, the book gets under your skin. For me, it was a little Marmite as there were parts I didn’t like (France’s legal system must be very different from the UK’s), plus, some scenes felt quite long. On the other hand, the book was touching and eye-opening and I felt drawn to every page and to Arnault.

“Indrajit Garai, an American citizen now, was born in India in 1965. After his Bachelors degree from Indian Institute of Technology and Masters from Harvard, he worked as a corporate strategy consultant and as an investment banker in America, Spain, and England, while studying parallelly Ayurveda (ancient medicine of India) for stress management.

In 2001, after the birth of his daughter, he moved to Paris, opened his private practice of stress management, and then authored six books in this field (five in French and one in English).

Authoring these books on stress management gave him a deep love for writing. Since 2015, he has devoted himself full-time to creating literature.”