The Bitterest Wine: A novel a couple of French household’s conflicting roles in the course of the German Occupation of Provence and well-known writers and poets who impressed resistance.

All that Professor Claire Somerset anticipated when she arrived in Provence the summer season of 1978 was a restful go to with buddies as she finishes sabbatical analysis on Surrealist poets concerned within the Resistance throughout World Struggle II. As an alternative, the attraction between her and winery proprietor Maurice Laurent units off a sequence of occasions that flip her life the other way up.

Somerset is given an nameless journal describing conflicting wartime roles inside a household: pacifist, collaborator, Nazi officer’s lover, Resistance member, prisoner of war–and assassin of a relative. The initials match the Laurent household. Do the Laurents find out about their quiet, easy cousin’s position within the Resistance? Did the assassin ever confess? What number of different secrets and techniques is Maurice’s household hiding?

Fictional characters and their experiences revolve amongst actual individuals and occasions main as much as the second invasion and liberation of Southern France. Every is influenced by writers who stored the thought of liberty alive below the specter of seize, torture and dying—corresponding to Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, André Malraux, Louis Aragon and René Char, the Surrealist poet answerable for parachute drop zones round Mont Ventoux. The significance of the wine business—warfare or no warfare—is woven all through because the Laurents’ disguised cellar hides each refugees and barrels of one of the best vintages.