#historical-reconstruction

#historical-reconstruction

A few years ago, sometime during the harrowing year of 2020 that would change everything, author Herve Le Tellier discovered that someone had written a name on the outer wall of his new house in the village of La Paillette, in southern France. When he later found that the same name appeared on the monument to the town's sons who died for the homeland, Le Tellier realized he had a story in his hands and that he wanted nothing more than to tell it.

We are initiated into a world in which historically accurate foodstuffs can be ordered online a half oyster shell, the exposed flesh shining as if with the freshest brine, is 31.25 for a single piece and begin to understand one of the most striking things about this novel: its insistence upon detail, its utter specificity, set against a deliberate lack of specificity regarding the larger details that the reader's mind naturally itches to fill in.