In August 1934, 56 young people from a penal colony on the Breton island of Belle-Île-en-Mer managed to escape. 20 francs - that's the price that the local police offer for each boy, whereupon the islanders start a chase. A single boy escapes, his story is told in this novel: Jules Bonneau, abandoned by his parents at an early age, after years in a home between frenzy and hopelessness, runs into the Breton sardine fisherman Ronan Kadarn and his wife. For the first time, he gets to know affection, a tenderness that shakes him. He lives with the fishermen, meets communists and fascists. And in the end, he has to make a decision that confronts him with his past.