Laurent Binet’s comic secret history of the French intelligentsia is both a wild send-up and an exuberant celebration of French intellectual tradition
- Longlisted
- The Man Booker International Prize 2019
- Published by Portobello Books
Buy the book
Hubert Mingarelli’s short, beautiful novel about friendship and the fragments of happiness that illuminate the darkness
A narrator remembers the harsh winter of 1919, fighting in the Russian Civil War on the Romanian front. Setting up camp in a forest, he and his closest friends from the battalion discover a pond, which becomes a secret place for the four young men to smoke, rest, wash and talk. Four Soldiers is about those precious months of waiting. Precious time before spring comes and their battalion moves on - and the inevitable resumption of war and its horror.
Hubert Mingarelli
Hubert Mingarelli was the author of numerous novels, short-story collections and fiction for young adults
More about Hubert Mingarelli