Death at Half Mast

Death at Half Mast (2019) is the English version of Denis Emorine's French novel La mort en berne, published by 5 Sens Editions in Geneva in 2017. It is the first of his novels in English.

Its protagonist is Dominique Valarcher, a writer who functions as Emorine's semi-autobiographical alter ego rather than the author himself. The same figure returns in Broken Identities (2025), so the two JEF novels read as a pair.

Emorine has been publishing in French since 1982 and now has well over thirty volumes across poetry, theatre, and fiction; the Valarcher books are among the few English-language doors into that body of work.