65 records matched your query       

Author:

Lema©ʼtre, Pierre, 1951- author.

Title:

The great swindle / Pierre Lemaitre ; translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Publisher:

MacLehose Press,

Copyright Date:

2015

Description:

442 pages ; 24 cm

Subject:

World War, 1914-1918--Fiction.
Veterans--France--Fiction.
Swindlers and swindling--Fiction.
France--History--1914-1940--Fiction.

Other Authors:

Wynne, Frank, translator.

Other Titles:

Au revoir l©-haut. English

Notes:

First published in French as Au revoir l©-haut by Editions Albin Michel, Paris, in 2013.

Summary:

"The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hole to silence him. Albert is rescued by fellow soldier, the artist Edouard P©♭ricourt, who takes a bullet in the face. The war ends and both men recover, but Edouard is permanently disfigured, and fakes his death to prevent his family from seeing him as a cripple. In gratitude for Edouard's rescue, Albert becomes the injured man's companion and caregiver. Finding that the postwar gratitude for the soldiers' service is nothing more than lip-service to an empty idea, the two men scramble to survive, ultimately devising a scam to take money for never-to-be-built war memorials from small towns. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pradelle has married Edouard's sister Madeline and is running a scam of his own that involves the exhumation of war victims. In this sorrowful, heart-searching novel, the interwoven lives of these three men create a tapestry of the human condition as seen through the lens of war, revealing brutality and compassion, heroism and cowardice, in equal measure."--provided by publisher.

ISBN:

1623659035
9781623659035

OCLC:

(OCoLC)907127681

LCCN:

2015540794

Locations:

BOPG851 -- Ames Public Library (Ames)

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)