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Now a major French film Au revoir là-haut - Prix Goncourt-winning masterpiece by the writer who brought you Alex, Irène and Camille.

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Now a major French film Au revoir là-haut - Prix Goncourt-winning masterpiece by the writer who brought you Alex, Irène and Camille.

October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, the ambitious Lieutenant Henri d´Aulnay Pradelle sends two scouts over the top, and secretly shoots them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more.

And so is set in motion a series of devastating events that will inextricably bind together the fates and fortunes of Pradelle and the two soldiers who witness his crime: Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt.

Back in civilian life, Albert and Édouard struggle to adjust to a society whose reverence for its dead cannot quite match its resentment for those who survived. But the two soldiers conspire to enact an audacious form of revenge against the country that abandoned them to penury and despair, with a scheme to swindle the whole of France on an epic scale.

Meanwhile, believing her brother killed in action, Édouard´s sister Madeleine has married Pradelle, who is running a little scam of his own...

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

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The vast sweep of the novel and its array of extraordinary secondary characters have attracted comparisons with the works of Balzac. Moving, angry, intelligent - and compulsive Marcel Berlins The Times

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Lemaitre, Pierre
Pierre Lemaitre was born in Paris in 1951. He worked for many years as a teacher of literature before becoming a novelist. He was awarded the Crime Writers´ Association International Dagger, alongside Fred Vargas, for Alex, and as sole winner for Camille. In 2013 his novel Au revoir là-haut (The Great Swindle, in English translation) won the Prix Goncourt, France´s leading literary award.

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