The Great Swindle

By: Pierre Lemaitre, Frank Wynne

Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong

Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, a timeless story of how war transforms lives in unexpected and often tragic ways as seen through the eyes of three World War I vets

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 Péricourt, 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.

2013, Prix Goncourt

2016, CWA International Dagger Award, Winner

©2013 Editions Albin-Michel - Paris (P)2015 MacLehose Press

Critic reviews

The vast sweep of the novel and its array of extraordinary secondary characters have attracted comparisons with the works of Balzac. Moving, angry, intelligent - and compulsive (Marcel Berlins)

A big, swirling tale that itself reads like a 19th-century novel ... thick with detail, immersing the reader in its elaborately bleak world (Sarah Lyall)

This book is thick with detail, immersing the reader in its elaborately bleak world ... an irresistible story (Patricia Wall)

Exceptionally powerful examination of the aftermath of war and of the people whose lives were washed away in its wake (Nick Rennison)

Lemaitre's novel is a rare synthesis of the tragic and the comic - a masterclass in nail-biting suspense ... Frank Wynne is a superb translator who captures the rude exuberance of the original French (Edward Wilson)

Engrossing . . . one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of recent years (David Mills)