The Deserters

“A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past…feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.) In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey—Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero—endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of The Deserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.” – Dustin Illingsworth - The New York Times
“A novel in counterpoint—Énard explores the role of the sciences in the past century’s horrors, even as he depicts an innate humanity in the bond between the soldier and the woman. In Charlotte Mandell’s translation from the French, the melding of themes is reproduced on the level of the language, which shifts from crisp scholarly exposition to vivid poetic fragments. Synthesizing so many ideas and styles is customary for this brilliant author; his formal skill and provocative intelligence remain well worth the encounter.” – Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal
“With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from ‘the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.’ It’s a masterpiece.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
”“A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe’s most challenging authors.”” – Kirkus
”“All of Énard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.”” – Joshua Cohen - The New York Times Book Review
“Two seemingly unconnected narratives—one saturated with history, the other scrubbed of all historical referents—explore themes of trauma and loss in this formally inventive novel… Énard uses their contrasting textures to sometimes unsettling but ultimately revelatory effect.” – Brendan Driscoll - Booklist
“A novelist of Europe’s real and imaginative frontiers, Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell.” – Nicholas Dames - Harper’s
“The Deserters relies on mathematics, but the content is literature. Both – form and content – are masterfully constructed.” – Ria Dhull - Spectrum Culture
“The Deserters weaves together two stories, told in very contrasting voices, exploring themes of commitment and betrayal, hope and survival, during times of war.” – International Booker Prize Committee
“Énard is a poet of fissures… The Deserters is briskly paced, features passages of breathless beauty, and feels in some way like a summation of his predilections: musings from the vantage point of a war criminal, odes to the solitary life of the mind, and dismay over the friction between the West and the Muslim world.” – Christopher Byrd - The New York Review of Books

Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, Zone, and Street of Thieves.

A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books from the French, including works by Flaubert, Proust, and Genet. In 2001 she received a translation prize from the Modern Language Association for her translation of Faux Pas by Maurice Blanchot, in 2018 she won the National Translation Award in Prose for her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard, in 2024 she received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2026 she received the French American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of The Deserters by Mathias Énard. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

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