Books

And Their Children After Them follows a group of young people growing up in a deindustrialised valley in eastern France during the 1990s. At the centre of the story are Anthony, a working-class boy, Stéphanie, a girl from a wealthier family to whom he is attracted, and Hacine, a boy of Moroccan descent with whom Anthony repeatedly clashes. The novel follows them over four summers between 1992 and 1998 as they try to find their place in the world, fall in love, have sex, deal cannabis, steal motorcycles and fight their boredom.

Myriam and Paul live with their two young children, Mila and Adam, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. When Myriam decides to return to work, they employ Louise, a middle-aged widow, as their nanny. Louise appears to be perfect: the children adore her, and she also cleans the flat and prepares elaborate meals. She becomes indispensable to the family, but troubling aspects of her behaviour begin to emerge. The novel opens with Louise’s murder of the two children before going back in time to explore the events that led to this horrific crime.

The Great Swindle begins on 2 November 1918, in the trenches of the First World War. With an armistice expected within days, the French soldiers have no desire to launch another attack against the Germans. However, the ambitious Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle provokes a final offensive by killing two of his own men and blaming the Germans for their deaths. When Albert Maillard discovers what he has done, Pradelle tries to kill him, but Maillard is saved by his fellow soldier Édouard Péricourt, who is gravely wounded and disfigured in the process. After the war, Maillard and Péricourt struggle to adapt to civilian life in Paris. Traumatised, impoverished and abandoned by the French state, they find themselves living in a society more interested in honouring the dead than supporting its surviving soldiers. They devise a scheme to sell war memorials to French towns without intending to build them. Meanwhile, Pradelle organises his own lucrative swindle, making money from the reburial of fallen soldiers by using undersized coffins and disregarding the identities of the bodies placed in them.

In 1910, Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, stays with textile manufacturer René Azaire and his family in Amiens, northern France, to learn about the textile industry. He falls in love with René’s wife, Isabelle, and the two run away to southern France. However, troubled by guilt, Isabelle leaves him and eventually returns to her husband. In 1916, Stephen finds himself near Amiens again, this time serving as a British officer during the Battle of the Somme. The novel provides unsparing descriptions of the fighting and life in the trenches. In the 1970s, Stephen’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, discovers his wartime journals and tries to reconstruct his experiences during the war.

Life: A User’s Manual is an experimental novel composed of various stories about the inhabitants of a Haussmann-style apartment block in Paris. The building is presented as though its façade had been removed, revealing its rooms and occupants at a single moment in time. Moving from room to room, the novel explores the residents’ lives and relationships. Its main storyline is the fifty-year project of Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman who lives in the building: after spending years learning to paint watercolours, he travels around the world, producing 500 paintings of different seaports; the paintings are turned into jigsaw puzzles, which he then tries to complete before having their colours dissolved, leaving only blank sheets of paper.

The Horseman on the Roof is a historical adventure novel about Angelo Pardi, a young Italian cavalry officer who, in 1832, travels through Provence in search of his friend Giuseppe, but finds himself caught in a cholera outbreak. When he reaches Manosque, he is accused of having poisoned the town’s fountains and takes refuge on the roofs of its deserted houses. He later helps care for the sick before leaving Manosque and continuing his journey through Provence. Along the way, he meets a young woman called Pauline de Théus, who is trying to rejoin her husband near Gap. As they travel together through the epidemic-stricken region, a growing affection develops between them.