Books from France

How does a man implicated in one of history’s greatest atrocities reinvent himself as an innocent bystander? In 1969, Albert Speer—Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments—publishes his memoirs, presenting himself as the “good Nazi” who knew nothing about the Holocaust. His carefully constructed narrative helps him escape the full weight of his responsibility and become a bestselling author. But behind this image lies a history of ambition, complicity, and calculated self-deception. Blending historical research with literary fiction, Jean-Noël Orengo reconstructs Speer’s rise, his proximity to Hitler, and his postwar reinvention. The result is a disturbing exploration of how powerful people manipulate memory, reshape their identities, and make fiction more seductive than truth. In an age of competing narratives, the novel asks who gets to control the story of the past.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies establish the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, to investigate Nazi crimes and help families discover the fates of millions of missing and displaced people. In 1990, Irène, a young Frenchwoman who has moved to Germany after marrying a German man, begins working at the institution. Meticulous and deeply committed to her work, she gradually becomes absorbed in the stories preserved within its archives. Years later, she is entrusted with returning thousands of personal belongings confiscated from concentration camp prisoners. A cloth doll, a medallion, and an embroidered handkerchief become clues to the identities of their former owners and the families they left behind. As Irène follows these traces across Europe, she uncovers stories of persecution, complicity, survival, and loss, while confronting the troubling silences surrounding Germany’s wartime past. Weaving together individual lives and collective memory, Gaëlle Nohant’s moving historical novel explores the enduring consequences of the Holocaust and the power of remembrance to restore dignity to those history has nearly erased.