Les Ames Grises (Paperback) by Philippe Claudel

from SharonGoforth

By A Slow River is a translation of French author Philippe Claudel's first novel, The Gray Souls. A combination mystery/police procedural, the story takes place in a French village during WWI. Three deaths have occurred simultaneously - that of a young, popular schoolteacher who has committed sui...

from lriley

Hard not to like this one. Kind of reminds me in some ways of Sebastian Japrisot's 'A very long engagement' only with the narrator kind of borrowing on the morose and bitter reflections of Bardamu in Celine's 'Journey to the end of the night.' In some ways it's a noirish thriller--the embittered ...

from Ameise1

What a wonderful sad story. It is told from the view of a police officer who has a lot of sympathy for all the inhabitants of a little Belgian village. He suffers all incidents with them which they have to face to. He describes everything with a great care and love for all protagonists be they ri...

from nosajeel

Excellent, in many ways better than Brodeck, this earlier novel is set during World War I and follows a similar non-linear tale of a village filled with archetypes and surprises. It centers around "The Case" -- the murder of a young girl -- which is just one of many terrible events in this town n...

from Smiler69

The crux of the events told in this story take place during WWI in a small French town. Our narrator, a retired policeman relates three different events having occurred during this period; the discovery of the body of a 10-year-old girl murdered by strangulation, the arrival of a new schoolmistre...