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The Book of Nights

Author: Sylvie Germain

Translator: Christine Donougher   Cover design: Marie Lane  

We experience one hundred years of French history, and three Franco-Prussian conflicts through the lives of the Peniel family. Sylvie Germain creates a magically bizarre universe around the patriarch of the family, nicknamed Night-of-Gold-Wolf-Face and his fifteen children, each distinguished by a gold speck in their left eye.
The grotesque and the bizarre are never far away in a book full of deeply moving events and great suffering. The effects of the carnage and the inhumanity of war upon this peasant family become ever more devastating, culminating in the holocaust of the Second World War.This is a novel on an epic scale, with the emotional intensity of a Greek tragedy in which life triumphs over the horrors of war and the power of death.

"The Book of Nights is a masterpiece. Germain is endowed with extraordinary narrative and descriptive abilities... She excels in portraits of emotional intensity and the gritty realism of raw emotions gives the novel its unique power." Ziauddin Sardar in The Independent

The publication of The Book of Nights made Sylvie Germain an overnight success in France. It has a big story on a wide canvas with unforgettable characters. It will appeal to lovers of Magic Realism and anyone who wants to read something very different which will linger in the imagination long after the book has been finished.

RRP: £9.99

No. of pages: 288

Publication date: 30.11.2013

ISBN numbers:
Paperback
978 1 909232 81 5
Ebook
978 1 909232 95 2

Rights:
UK and Commonwealth