The Deserters interweaves two distinct narrative lines. In one, a soldier walks away from an unnamed war somewhere in the Mediterranean world, moving through hostile terrain with no clear destination, his desertion less an act of conviction than of exhaustion. In the other, set in 2001, a group of mathematicians gathers for a shipboard conference honoring the memory of Paul Heudeber, a mathematician and Nazi camp survivor; his daughter Irina, present at the conference, is left trying to understand the reasons behind her father's suicide years earlier.
Énard, known for dense, formally ambitious novels like Compass and Zone, uses the two threads to circle the same questions from different distances — how war reshapes the people who survive it, and what the following generation inherits of that damage even when the details are withheld from them.
The Deserters was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. It's a shorter, more compressed work than Énard's earlier novels but carries the same interest in history's long aftershocks.