The Deserters

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend. Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict – in love as in politics – comes to light: commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell, this latest work from Mathias Enard vividly lays bare the devastations of war on the most intimate aspects of our lives.



Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. The Deserters is his sixth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.