num_pages: 208
description: 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 bedside 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.
language: English
title: Grey Souls
titlecomplete: Grey Souls
genres: France, Roman, Historical, Mystery, War, Historical Fiction, Literature, French Literature, Fiction, Crime
ratings_count: 4795
places: France
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Martin Beck Award, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Prix Renaudot, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle
category: roman, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Premi Llibreter de narrativa, awardedAt: 1262332800000
name: Metų verstinė knyga
publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson