Léon & Louise

‘A gem of a novel’ 
The New York Times

‘A beautiful love story’ 
BBC Radio Oxford

‘The eccentric charm … keeps you tearing through the pages’ 
O, The Oprah Magazine

‘A powerful tale of love lost and found’ 
Booklist

Summer 1918. The First World War is drawing to a close when Léon Le Gall, a French teenager who has dropped out of school and left home, falls in love with Louise Janvier. Both are severely wounded by German artillery fire, are separated, and believe each other to be dead.

Briefly reunited two decades later, the two lovers are torn apart again by Louise’s refusal to destroy Léon’s marriage and the German invasion of France. Through occupied Paris during the Second World War, where Léon struggles against the abhorrent tasks imposed upon him by the SS, and the wilds of Africa, where Louise confronts the hardships of her environment, they battle the vicissitudes of history and the passage of time for the survival of their love.

ALEX CAPUS is the author of A Matter of Time, Almost Like Spring, Life is Good, A Price to Pay, and Skidoo, and Sailing by Starlight.

JOHN BROWNJOHN is an experienced and versatile literary translator with almost 200 books to his credit. His work has won him critical acclaim and numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (three times), the US PEN, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes and Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us.