A Good Death - Softcover

Elizabeth-ironside

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340716878 ISBN 13: 9780340716878

Publisher: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 2000

Synopsis

It?s 1944 and Theo Cazalle is returning to the family he left in Bonnemort, an estate deep in the French countryside, when he went off to fight with the Free French. Memories of Bonnemort have sustained him through four years of war, but when at last he comes home, he finds his world in tatters. The house has been abandoned, a family servant has been shot, Theo?s wife has been accused of collaborating, and a Nazi officer has been found dead in front of Bonnemort?s front gate. To save his sanity, Theo must restore order to Bonnemort, but first he must understand the disorder into which it has fallen. Is his wife a whore? A murderer? Or could there be another alternative?

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

British author Ironside (Death in the Garden) convincingly depicts the trauma of life in Vichy France in her compelling second novel. In 1944, after the Allied liberation, Theo de Cazalle, who faked his death four years earlier and joined the French Resistance, returns to his remote country estate, Bonnemort, where someone has slit the throat of a German officer and dumped the naked corpse in front of the house. De Cazalle suspects his wife, Ariane, believed to have betrayed her countrymen by becoming the Nazi's mistress, of the murder. Through flashbacks, which include Ariane's perspective as well as that of a Jewish schoolgirl Ariane has rescued and is concealing, Ironside deftly presents the powerlessness of her characters and the hard moral compromises they have to make to survive. Finally, amid multiple horrors and personal sacrifices, the author succeeds in making the fate of a beloved farm animal moving. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: HODDER & STOUGHTON
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0340716878
• ISBN 13: 9780340716878
• Binding: Paperback