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All Human Wisdom

On sale

10th June 2021

Price: £10.99

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Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9780857059024

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“Terrific . . . Easily the most purely entertaining novel I have read so far this year” David Mills, The Sunday Times

“A really excellent suspense novelist” Stephen King

The second volume of Pierre Lemaitre’s enthralling, award-winning between-the-wars trilogy

In 1927, the great and the good of Paris gather at the funeral of the wealthy banker, Marcel Péricourt. His daughter, Madeleine, is poised to take over his financial empire (although, unfortunately, she knows next to nothing about banking). More unfortunately still, when Madeleine’s seven-year-old son, Paul, tumbles from a second floor window of the Péricourt mansion on the day of his grandfather’s funeral, and suffers life-changing injuries, his fall sets off a chain of events that will reduce Madeleine to destitution and ruin in a matter of months.

Using all her reserves of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and a burning desire for retribution, Madeleine sets about rebuilding her life. She will be helped by an ex-Communist fixer, a Polish nurse who doesn’t speak a word of French, a brainless petty criminal with a talent for sabotage, an exiled German Jewish chemist, a very expensive forger, an opera singer with a handy flair for theatrics, and her own son with ideas for a creative new business to take Paris by storm.

A brilliant, imaginative, free-falling caper through between-the-wars Paris, and a portrait of Europe on the edge of disaster.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union


From the reviews for The Great Swindle

“The most purely enjoyable book I’ve read this year” Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph

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, The Times


Reviews

Journal du Dimanche
A perfectly orchestrated comédie humaine
Figaro
An epic inhabited by flamboyant characters and imbued with an all-consuming drama
Express
Confirms the genius of a great novelist and storyteller
L'Obs
Literature with conviction; a furious talent
Libération
Pierre Lemaitre: unleashed
David Mills, The Sunday Times
Terrific . . . Easily the most purely entertaining novel I have read so far this year
Antonia Senior, The Times
Lemaitre is always readable and his caustic wit shines through