In 2018 Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt, France's most famous literary honour, for this, his second novel.

Starting in 1992, it unfolds at two-year intervals, over four summers in a valley in Lorraine, not far from the Luxembourg border.

Here the "echoing carcass" of the blast furnace in a decommissioned steel mill overshadows the (fictional) town of Heillange.

It all begins, and ends, with motorbikes. The first, a Suzuki YZ, belongs to 14-year-old Anthony Casati's volatile, hard-drinking dad. A tough kid named Hachine Bouali from a housing estate, steals it from Anthony during a party at a posh schoolmate's house.

Six years later, Anthony returns the favour. He steals a Suzuki DR, owned by the now-married Hacine on the hot summer night in 1998 when France beat Croatia in the World Cup semi-final and the divided nation surrendered briefly to a "total fantasy" of unity and togetherness.

Or, to tell it differently, 14-year-old Anthony and his cousin decide to steal a canoe to fight their all-consuming boredom on a lazy summer afternoon. Their simple act of rebellion will lead to Anthony's first love and his first real summer that comes to define everything that follows.

Over four sultry summers in the 1990s, Anthony and his friends grow up in a France trapped between nostalgia and decline, decency and rage, desperate to escape the confines of their petty small town and the scrutiny of their parents in search of a more hopeful future.

The defunct mill no longer governs the lives of people wounded by the "30 years of devastation" that have, says the pompous mayor, "reshaped the world of work". But in the valley the lake still sparkles, crops thrive and forests sway around the "rusty jungle" of obsolete industry while the community's "centuries-old solidarities" dissolve "in the great bath of competitive forces".

The redundant steelworks men, with their "lugubrious faces, big hands and crushed hearts" struggle to adapt to this post-industrial order. They "said little and died young".

Their womenfolk have a slightly better chance of finding a role, even wider freedoms, in the high-tech, short-term, computer-controlled workplaces that replace factories in this new era of "the individual, the temp, the isolate".

Meanwhile, the drifting children of the valley seek a purpose - children like Anthony, his father Patrick trapped in a spiral of menial jobs, booze and fights in which he swings fists "heavy with misery and missed chances".

Or Hacine, a wannabe drug-dealer with grand plans and a Moroccan father, Malek, whose stoicism reflects long years trapped in the "tangle of tacit rules" that curb a migrant's chances.

Or high-flying Steph, whom Anthony yearns for across a chasm of class, with a politically ambitious father with a Mercedes concession but who feels like a "total bumpkin" at a crammer in Paris.

The book's title, And their children after them is taken from the Book of Ecclesiasticus that opens with the words "Let us now praise famous men ..."

It is a lament over the social and psychic ravages left by deindustrialisation of a forgotten underclass in French society much in line with the works of Emile Zola and, nearer to us, Michel Houellebecq. The details define the daily life of the time - the snacks, the shows, the radio hits, the catch-phrases, the sneaker brands, "the dense materiality of things", the grunge cult of Nirvana.

There is no progress registered: Anthony, Hacine, Steph and their families remain more or less where they have long been. Widening the vision, the "subterranean history" of the valley tells of "children who had been devoured by wolves, wars, factories".

And yet not all is lost - sublime, indifferent nature may oversee the messes made by man, inequality may persist over generations but a fumbling teenage love in a torrid July night still has power "confronting the darkness, the lake's animal presence, the weight of the sky".

The days of the worker class are over, the Maghreb migrants have been more or less (badly) integrated, there's a new ball game on in which everyone is the loser. One can thus understand the rage of the Gilets Jaune and the frustration expressed. There are no winners.

The only winners, if one can so define them, are the "selflessly devoted" young mothers who settle for drudgery tempered by love. Anthony senses this is not just "the fate of his class" but also "the law of the species".