https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:25:35 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-deserters/ Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=48392 The latest novel by 2015 Prix Goncourt-winner Mathias Enard, The Deserters lays bare the devastations of war on the most intimate aspects of our lives.

]]> Fleeing a nameless war, a soldier emerges from the Mediterranean scrubland, filthy, exhausted and seeking refuge. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a scientific conference pays tribute to the late Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, communist and anti-fascist whose commitment to his side of the Wall was unshaken by its collapse. The oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself – brings to light everything that is at stake in times of conflict: truth and deception, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell and told in Mathias Enard’s typically mesmerizing, inventive prose,  The Deserters  lays bare the ravages of war on the most intimate aspects of life – and asks what remains of our selves in its wreckage.

]]> https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-annual-banquet-of-the-gravediggers-guild/ Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=35790 Brimming with Mathias Enard's characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel set in western France, where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.

]]> To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.

]]>