First round selection for the Prix Goncourt 2005

UK rights sold to Daedalus

Magnus is the name of the teddy bear found in the child’s arms, in the debris. It later becomes the child’s name. In this poignant novel about loss, and self, prize-winning author Sylvie Germain exposes the unbearable lightness of losing one’s past, even if that past would have been a terrible burden. Set in 1940s Germany, this is the story of Franz-Georg, a young boy with amnesia, found in war-torn Hamburg in the debris of a crushed building. We understand that he has lost his parents in the bombing, and that his adoptive father, a doctor, works, it becomes horribly clear, in a concentration camp. At the war’s end, the boy is sent to England with another new identity, this time not to hide the reality of his parents’ loss, but to escape shame in post-war Germany, and the Nazi war-criminal legacy of his adoptive parents. In England, a previously unknown older brother takes him in, this time as Adam. When Adam has a revealing dream, he realizes he is nothing but a series of lies, a fragmented self, and that his real past is still unknown. He decides to call himself the only true name he knows, for anything: Magnus. In the utter lack of a better identity than the name of his beloved teddy-bear, we follow Magnus’s quest for truth and self through dream sequences, poetry, and fragments of text.