Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend. Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict - in love as in politics - comes to light: commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell, this latest work from Mathias Enard vividly lays bare the devastations of war on the most intimate aspects of our lives.

About the Author

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix litteraire de la Porte Doree and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. The Deserters is his sixth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Reviews

'Mathias Enard is one of the best contemporary French writers, and his works - ambitious, erudite, multifaceted, surprising and unconventional - are always worth reading, because they always strike a perfect balance between the best that literature can offer: pleasure and knowledge.'
- Javier Cercas, author of The Impostor

'Every novel by Mathias Enard reminds me of the reasons why I read fiction. He is ambitious, erudite, full of life, and a wonderful stylist to boot. He is one of the great novelists of our time.'
- Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins

'All of Enard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age.'
- Joshua Cohen, New York Times

'A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.'
- Christopher Beha, Harper's

'The most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.'
- Leo Robson, New Statesman

Book Information
ISBN 9781804271636
Author Mathias Enard
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions