Brodeck's Report: WINNER OF THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE - Hardcover

A haunting study of isolated communities and the potential for violence lurking in them . a superb example of Philippe Claudel's work' Mail on Sunday. (Mail on Sunday)

There are dark shades of Kafka, Camus, and Primo Levi but Claudel's lyricism evokes the deliciousness of life even as he plumbs the depths of intolerance and evil' Financial Times. (Financial Times)

Simply and lucidly composed, splendidly constructed, Brodeck's Report is a magnificent book . above all, on the question of otherness - Le Monde (Le Monde)

A superb novel, equal parts Kafkaesque disorientation, Primo Levi's devastating account's of the killing camps, Italo Calvino's post-modern playfulness and Jean Genet's unflinching eye for the sewers through which the blood of our histories must flow' Sunday Business Post. (Sunday Business Post)

.an original, brilliant and disturbing book . It is a relentless, uncomfortable book that achieves a beauty of its own through Claudel's deft writing and passionate commitment to truth. Claudel is a novelist of ideas, in the French tradition. He deals skillfully in archetypes and abstractions . a journey that goes to the heart of what it means to be human - The Times. (The Times)

The report that Brodeck is writing into the lynching of an artist, an outsider, a flamboyant Other figure who has deeply disturbed the fragile equilibrium of the town he briefly settled in, becomes a report into the catastrophe of his own life. Brodeck, it seems, himself also an outsider, has lately returned from a concentration camp. In the course of his investigation into the death of the artist, he uncovers the truth about his distant origins, about his having been rounded up when the Germans came to the town, and all that happened to his family when he was gone. This immensely powerful chronicle of a community's fear and loathing of what is strange, what is from the outside, has been hailed as one of the outstanding European novels of the last decade.