The Murdered Innocence

During a sleepover in Bavaria in the early sixties, the French boy Paul Marleau meets Clara, the daughter of a former Wehrmacht doctor. A terrible murder has just taken place in a forest near the seemingly peaceful village, about which the villagers stubbornly remain silent. The drama turns out to be traced back to events in the Second World War. Clara becomes a photographer in war zones and Paul a sculptor in Paris. Their lives diverge, they cannot commit to each other, but they can never really let each other go either.
The Murdered Innocence is melancholic and compelling like Philippe Claudel's Grey Souls: a novel about war, love, evil, art and happiness. It tells the story of all those lives that have been confronted with the ambiguity and brutality of the twentieth century.