In less than a century, German forces poured into France on no fewer than three occasions. This is the story of the Peniel family, and how they coped with troops invading their Flanders homeland.

The B rynxes are a middle-class family. Charlam, the grandfather, who wants to take control after the death of his son, Georges, in a road accident; Sabine, his daughter-in-law, who mutely but successfully wards off his encroachment. The three sons, who seem relatively unaffected by the loss of their father and who make their own way in life, sometimes to Charlam's approval, sometimes to his disapproval. Marie, the daughter, whose leg was damaged in the accident rebels against his authority. dith, the aunt, whose undiscovered secret is her passion for her nephew, Georges; and Pierre, whom Sabine chances to encounter; Mr Loyalty, the man she can rely on in her business and who becomes a kind of honorary uncle to the children, much to the disgust of Charlam complete the family group..But that is merely the surface. What gives this novel its special flavour are the things unseen, the magma of hopes, desires, fantasies, memories, humiliations, passions and hatreds bubbling beneath the surface of all their lives, which Sylvie Germain evokes with the poetic intensity that distinguishes her novels.

Magnus is a deeply moving and enigmatic novel about the Holocaust. Magnus is a man searching for his own identity, attempting to piece together the complex puzzle of his life. But his true story turns out to be closer to a painting by Edward Munch than the romantic tale of family heroism and self-sacrifice on which he was nurtured by the woman he believed was his mother. In Magnus, Sylvie Germain uses imagination and intuition to unlock the enigma of human life and confer on history the power of myth and fable.

"An intricate, finely crafted and polished tale, The Weeping Woman brings magic-realism to the dimly lit streets of Prague. Through the squares and alleys a woman walks, the embodiment of human pity, sorrow, death. Everyone she passes is touched by her, and Germain skilfully creates an intense mood and feel in her attempt to produce a spiritual map of Prague."The ObserverThe figure of this bereft woman develops into a memorable symbol: her sudden appearances - on a bridge, in a square, in a room - haunt the book like history, moved to tears."Robert Winder in The Independent"a haunting classic" Madeleine Kingsley in She Magazine

When tragedy strikes and Theodore Lebon is robbed of his adored wife, or rather, his wife's head, for it is only her headless body that returns home after a riding accident, we are once again in that strange world that Sylvie Germain has made her own. It is a world where certainties dissolve and the confines of reality shift to embrace the unexpected and the improbable, the absurd, the grotesque, even the miraculous. Nothing is too weird or wonderful to find a place in her richly imaginative fiction.