Synopsis
Winner of the 2023 Grand Prix RTL-Lire Fiction Award
Sometimes when you are looking for the dead, you find the living.
In 1990, Irène joins the The International Tracing Service. Meticulous and conscientious, she quickly becomes obsessed with her work - at the cost of her personal life. Years later, she is entrusted with returning thousands of confiscated objects, recovered from the liberated camps.
Irène pieces together the identity of each object's rightful owner, in order to give the descendants of the victims something by which to remember their lost relatives. A faded cloth doll, a medallion, an embroidered handkerchief . . . every object contains a story. Over the course of her investigations, Irène reconstructs what happened to the deceased from the traces they left behind, and in so doing she glimpses humanity - at its worst, but also, its best.
Weaving together the trajectories of these individual lives with the collective memory of Europe, this devastatingly beautiful novel is suffused with wisdom and compassion.
Sometimes when you are looking for the dead, you find the living.
In 1990, Irène joins the The International Tracing Service. Meticulous and conscientious, she quickly becomes obsessed with her work - at the cost of her personal life. Years later, she is entrusted with returning thousands of confiscated objects, recovered from the liberated camps.
Irène pieces together the identity of each object's rightful owner, in order to give the descendants of the victims something by which to remember their lost relatives. A faded cloth doll, a medallion, an embroidered handkerchief . . . every object contains a story. Over the course of her investigations, Irène reconstructs what happened to the deceased from the traces they left behind, and in so doing she glimpses humanity - at its worst, but also, its best.
Weaving together the trajectories of these individual lives with the collective memory of Europe, this devastatingly beautiful novel is suffused with wisdom and compassion.
Details
16 July 2026
9781786583703Imprint: Manilla Press
Reviews
A gripping, poetic and historically accurate description of one of the principal institutions of Holocaust research, the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen. Gaëlle Nohant gave me access to the archives, a place full of secrets, withheld for decades. I couldn't stop reading this seemingly simple but vital story of returning objects to their rightful place. I was transported by the violence, grief, trauma, generational secrets, and ultimately the power of memory and restitution.
This is an important book, intertwining history with a capital H and the personal quest of a determined archivist. Because it engages with themes that have long preoccupied me - the traces of the past, the memories held in objects and places, the indelible scars of history -Gaëlle Nohant's novel touched me profoundly...an unforgettable read.
A journey toward knowledge and closure that reads like a gripping mystery stirring the heart as well as the intellect. At once, a spellbinding novel and a moral triumph.
