Epic Annette

Epic Annette: A Heroine's Tale is the story of real-life Anne Beaumanoir, a courageous, brilliant woman born in Brittany in 1923. Guided by a passion for justice and a fervent belief in self-determination, she joined the French Resistance and moved to Paris at the age of nineteen, where she saved the lives of two Jewish children.

She married and settled into post-war Marseille, giving birth to two sons but put that comfortable life at risk by supporting the Algerian FLN in France. This resulted in her being imprisoned in 1959 while pregnant with a third child. After making a dramatic escape, she then served in the Ministry of Health under newly-independent Algeria's first president, Ben Bella, until his overthrow in 1965. Having been found guilty in absentia and sentenced to ten years in prison, she lived in exile in Switzerland until an amnesty allowed her to return to France.

In a series of Homeric asides, Anne Weber discusses the ethical and philosophical aspects of Annette's life choices. She resembles the great Mediterranean heroes Odysseus and Aeneas; her character is her destiny, peripatetic, always exploring, ultimately not tragic but not without costly personal sacrifice.

It pushes linguistic, narrative and genre conventions to their limits, while posing big ethical questions, as its heroine's idealism comes up against dirty realpolitik. - TLS Review of the German Edition