Confidant

I got a letter one day, a long letter that wasn't signed. Camille reads this narration of events from pre-war France, certain that it has been sent to her by mistake. Then more letters start to arrive - They tell of a friendship struck up between a young village girl, Annie, and Madame M, a bourgeois lady. To begin with the women simply share a love of art, but when Annie offers to carry a child for her infertile friend, their lives become intimately entwined. The child is born on the eve of the German invasion of France, and the repercussions of her birth are still felt decades later. This stunning debut novel, in the vein of Irène Némirovsky's 'Suite Française', is a gripping study of the destruction unleashed, when human desires for love and motherhood turn to obsession.

Helene Gremillon was born in 1977 and lives in Paris. The Confidant is her first novel and has been translated from the original French into more than twenty languages.