The Exiles Adrien Bosc

The Exiles A novel of artists adrift in a time of war Adrien Bosc Translated by Frank Wynne New title

A magical story of eccentrics and geniuses on a voyage of escape from Nazi-occupied Europe

On 24 March, 1941, a converted cargo ship named the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle left Marseille, fleeing Vichy France and the devastation of the war. The ship was filled with two hundred refugees: immigrants from the East, exiled Spanish Republicans, Jews, stateless persons and decadent artists. Among them were Claude Lévi-Strauss, the painter Wifredo Lam, the writers Anna Seghers and André Breton, and the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge.

As Adrien Bosc’s magical second novel follows the ship from Marseille to Casablanca to Martinique and on to New York, it tells an evocative story of migration, cultural crisis and the intellectual cost of the rise of fascism. The Exiles is a wonderful, charismatic voyage with some of Europe’s greatest minds.

Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78816 273 9 320pp eISBN: 978 1 78283 561 5 November 2020 World English Language

Adrien Bosc was born in Avignon in 1986. He is the founder of Éditions du sous-sol and the magazines Desports and Feuilleton, and works in Paris as a publisher. In 2014, he received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française for his first novel Constellation.

For readers of At the Existentialist Café, Soldiers of Salamis and The Order of the Day.

One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Bosc’s previous novel sold 200,000 copies in France and won the Académie Française prize