Three Days and a Life - Hardcover

"Lemaitre may be the best current French writer of crime fiction."
--Financial Times


"No one is writing quirkier thrillers than Lemaitre, who gets inside the head of his unhinged protagonist with wicked delight while capturing the madness of the modern world. French favorite Lemaitre's novel, about a preteen on whom fortune smiles in the most devious ways after he accidentally kills a little boy, is a feverish, wickedly entertaining work."
--Kirkus Reviews


"Three Days and a Life is excellent: A heartbreaking and masterful portrait of a man's life, marked by a childhood mistake."
--Crime by the Book


"Thought-provoking and unsettling, Three Days And A Life is another work of genius from a master storyteller at the top of his game."--The Daily Express

"Lemaitre is surely France's most elegant and imaginative crime writer."--The Times

"Taut character study and a vivid portrayal of an isolated community."--France Magazine

"Lemaitre magnificently manipulates the readers' compassions and succeeds in dropping several remarkable plot twists that surprisingly help alter the initial events. Three Days and a Life is a heartbreaking and darkly disturbing psychological page-turner written with simplicity and creativity."
--New York Journal of Books


"An intense, character-driven tale about how guilt over one senseless act can impact the rest of your life."
--Always with a Book


"Lemaitre is a skillful writer, employing his words carefully to sketch Antoine's feelings and fears so fervently that we desperately want to protect the child. Wonderful at creating grey protagonists, Lemaitre captures human frailty and reality, while simultaneously questioning our moral certainties."
--Times of India


"A complex experiment in the social infrastructure of a small French town, right and wrong, and the rawness of the family unit . . . A great book that generates a lot of thought-provoking questions."
--Daily Republic

In 1999, in the small provincial town of Beauval, France, twelve-year-old Antoine Courtin accidentally kills a young neighbor boy in the woods near his home. Panicked, he conceals the body and to his relief--and ongoing shame--he is never suspected of any connection to the child's disappearance.
But the boy's death continues to haunt him, shaping his life in unseen ways. More than a decade later, Antoine is living in Paris, now a young doctor with a fiancée and a promising future. On a rare trip home to the town he hates and fears, Antoine thoughtlessly sleeps with a beautiful young woman from his past. She shows up pregnant at his doorstep in Paris a few months later, insisting that they marry.

Meanwhile, the newly discovered body of Antoine's childhood victim means that the case has been reopened, and all of his old fears rush back. With the gravitational pull of his hometown strengthening its grip, Antoine may finally be forced to confront his past. Is he prepared to do what he must to keep his darkest secrets buried?