A Very Long Engagement: A Novel

“Riveting...A fierce, elliptical novel that's both a gripping psychological thriller and highly moving meditation on the emotional consequence of war.”

— The New York Times


In January 1917, five wounded French soldiers, hands bound before them, are brought to the front at Picardy by their own troops, forced to climb from the trenches onto the narrow strip of no-man's-land that separates the French and German armies, and left to die in the crossfire.

Their brutal punishment has been kept secret for over two years when Mathilde Donnay, a young, wheelchair-bound woman from a small town in the South, begins a relentless quest to find out whether her fiance, officially "killed in the line of duty," might still be alive.

The fiercely independent and determined Mathilde combs the country for information about the other four soldiers:

*A farmer from the Dordogne

*A former carpenter

*A Parisian trade unionist

*A street hustler from Marseilles

As she uncovers more about their lives, an elaborate web of deception and coincidence emerges. Struggling against all reason and counsel, Mathilde carries her search to its end, and in discovering what happened to each of the five men, Mathilde also begins to understand the horrors–and the acts of kindness–brought about by war.

A runaway bestseller, the winner of the Prix Interallie prize, and a major motion picture, A Very Long Engagement is an engrossing mystery, a playful study of the different ways one story is told, and a moving and incisive portrait of life in France during and after the First World War.

Praise for A Very Long Engagement:

“A kind of latter-day War and Peace...This is a book that is many things: a war story, a story of official corruption, an idyll of young summer love, and a rich and most original panorama of French men and women living in peace and robbed of it.”

—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Book Review