Magnus

Magnus is a deeply moving and enigmatic novel about the Holocaust. It has been Sylvie Germain's most commercially successful novel in France.Magnus is a man searching for his own identity, who pieces together the complex puzzle of his life, which 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.Magnus won the Goncourt Lyceen Prize, selected by French High School Students as the best novel of the year from the main Goncourt Prize Shortlist. It is a short and profound novel suitable for 16-year-olds upwards and is a good starting point for exploration of the Holocaust.Sylvie Germain was born in Chateauroux in Central France in 1954. She read philosophy at the Sorbonne, being awarded a doctorate. From 1987 until the summer of 1993 she taught philosophy at the French School in Prague. She now lives in Angouleme. Sylvie Germain is the author of thirteen works of fiction, eleven of which have been published by Dedalus, a study of the painter Vermeer and a religious meditation. Her work has been translated into twenty one languages and has received worldwide acclaim. Sylvie Germain's first novel The Book of Nights was published to France to great acclaim in 1985. It has won five literary prizes as well as the TLS Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize in England.The novel's story is continued in Night of Amber in 1987. Her third novel Days of Anger won the Prix Femina in 1989. It was followed by The Medusa Child in 1991 and The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague in 1992, the beginning of her Prague trilogy, continued with Infinite Possibilities in 1993 and then Invitation to a Journey (L'Eclats du sel). The Book of Tobias saw a return to rural France and la France profonde, followed in 2002 by The Song of False Lovers (Chanson des Mal-Aimants). Her next novel Magnus, was written in fragments, and creates a powerful study of the Holocaust and the long shadow it left. It won the Goncourt Lyceen Prize for the best French novel of 2005. It was published by Dedalus in 2008 followed by Hidden Lives in the autumn of 2010.