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The
2007 Award
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Grey Souls
by Philippe
Claudel |
Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| This
is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in 1917,
and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in Northern France,
near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. The war is still being fought
in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the
town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local
factory. One morning a beautiful ten year old girl, one of the three daughters
of the innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion
falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation
and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the beside of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks. More than one record has to be set straight. Beautiful, like a fairy story almost, frozen in time, this novel has an hypnotic quality. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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Philippe Claudel was born in 1962. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the Prix Goncourt for Stories in 2003.
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Copyright
© 2007 Dublin City Public Libraries
