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 forThe 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