All he is offered are small, demoralizing jobs. He has reached his very lowest ebb, and can see no way out.

So when a major company finally invites him to an interview, Alain Delambre is ready to do anything, borrow money, shame his wife and his daughters and even participate in the ultimate recruitment test: a role-playing game that involves hostage-taking.

Alain Delambre commits body and soul in this struggle to regain his dignity.

But if he suddenly realised that the dice had been loaded against him from the start, his fury would be limitless.

And what began as a role-play game could quickly become a bloodbath.

“One of the most pleasurable reading experiences of recent years” – David Mills, The Sunday Times

October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, the ambitious Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay Pradelle sends two scouts over the top, and secretly shoots them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more.

And so is set in motion a series of devastating events that will inextricably bind together the fates and fortunes of Pradelle and the two soldiers who witness his crime: Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt.

Back in civilian life, Albert and Édouard struggle to adjust to a society whose reverence for its dead cannot quite match its resentment for those who survived. But the two soldiers conspire to enact an audacious form of revenge against the country that abandoned them to penury and despair, with a scheme to swindle the whole of France on an epic scale.

Meanwhile, believing her brother killed in action, Édouard’s sister Madeleine has married Pradelle, who is running a little scam of his own…

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne