Book Of Nights

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 publication of The Book of Nights made Sylvie Germain an overnight success in France. The Book of Nights won 5 literary prizes in France and The Scott Moncrieff French Translation Prize in the UK. It has a big story on a wide canvas with unforgettable characters. It will appeal to lovers of Magic Realism and anyone who wants read something very different which will linger in the imagination long after the book has been finished. 'The novel tells the story of the Peniel family in the desolate wetlands of Flanders, across which the German invaders pour three times -1870, 1914 and 1940 - in less than a century. It is hard to avoid thinking of A Hundred Years of Solitude but the comparison does no disservice to Germain's novel, so powerful is it. A brilliant book, excellently translated.' Mike Petty in The Literary Review