A Very Long Engagement - Hardcover

Japrisot, Sebastien

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374283354 ISBN 13: 9780374283353

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993

Synopsis

In January 1917, five wounded French soldiers, hands bound before them, are brought to the front at Picardy by their own troops, forced to climb from the trenches onto the narrow strip of no-man's-land that separates the French and German armies, and left to die in the cross fire. Their brutal punishment has been hushed up for over two years when Mathilde Donnay, a young, wheelchair-bound woman from a small town in the South, begins a relentless quest to find out whether her fiance, officially "killed in the line of duty," might still be alive.
As the fiercely independent and wonderfully imaginative Mathilde combs the country for information about the other four soldiers - a farmer from the Dordogne, a street hustler from Marseilles, a Parisian trade unionist, and a carpenter - an elaborate web of deception and coincidence emerges. Struggling against all reason and counsel, Mathilde carries her search to its end, and in discovering what happened to the five men, she comes also to an understanding of the horrors, and the acts of kindness, brought about by war.
A runaway bestseller in France and the winner of the 1991 Prix Interallie, A Very Long Engagement is an engrossing mystery, a playful study of the different ways one story is told, and a moving and incisive portrait of life in France during and after the First World War.

About this title

Review:

"The narrative is brilliantly complex and beguiling, and the climax devastating" (Independent)

"Clever, highly readable... Neither predictable nor surprising, the dénouement, when it finally happens, is shocking, moving and horribly convincing" (Literary Review)

"A classic of its kind, brewing up enormous pathos undiluted by sentimentality" (Daily Telegraph)

"A fierce, elliptical novel that's both a gripping philosophical thriller and a highly moving meditation on the emotion consequences of war" (New York Times)

"Only the best historical fiction can make the journey into a distant time and return with a believable sense of how things really were. That Japrisot's book has done so is a mark of his great talent and experience as a writer" (Washington Post)

Book Description:

'Diabolically clever... The reader is alternately impressed, beguiled, frightened, bewildered... A considerable achievement' Anita Brookner

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0374283354
• ISBN 13: 9780374283353
• Binding: Hardcover