Leon and Louise - Softcover

Léon can t forget Louise. Louise can t forget Léon. Readers of Alex Capus s beautifully imagined novel will find it impossible to forget Léon and Louise, the most enchanting couple to grace the pages of a novel in recent years.
The First World War is drawing to a close. Léon Le Gall has just dropped out of high school and left his family home near Cherbourg when he meets and falls in love with Louise Janvier. Their romance will end only with Léon s death, in 1986. Yet Léon and Louise are destined to be lovers in absentia only. A series of misfortunes, the tides of world history, and the choices both make throughout their lives conspire to bring them together for brief intense moments only to keep them apart again for decades.
Moving from the French Atlantic coast during the last years of World War I to Paris in the twenties, from occupied France during the Second World War to West Africa, Léon and Louise is a gracefully narrated story about an enduring passion. Yet Leon is alone as he battles against the abhorrent tasks imposed on him by the German SS in occupied Paris; Louise is without Léon in the wilds of Africa, where she is sent during the war and where she confronts hardships with great courage, force of will, and no small amount of humor. Capus simultaneously tells the story of a great love through the very separate lives of its protagonists and recounts the complex colorful lives of two individuals through their love for one another.

Alex Capus was born in Normandy in 1961 and now lives in Olten, Switzerland. He is the author of over ten works of fiction. Léon and Louise, an instant bestseller in Germany, is his first book to be made available to American readers.