All Human Wisdom

"Terrific . . . Easily the most purely entertaining novel I have read so far this year" David Mills The Sunday Times

"A really excellent suspense novelist" Stephen King

The second volume of Pierre Lemaitre's enthralling award-winning between-the-wars trilogy

In 1927 the great and the good of Paris gather at the funeral of the wealthy banker Marcel Péricourt. His daughter Madeleine is poised to take over his financial empire (although unfortunately she knows next to nothing about banking). More unfortunately still when Madeleine's seven-year-old son Paul tumbles from a second floor window of the Péricourt mansion on the day of his grandfather's funeral and suffers life-changing injuries his fall sets off a chain of events that will reduce Madeleine to destitution and ruin in a matter of months.

Using all her reserves of ingenuity resourcefulness and a burning desire for retribution Madeleine sets about rebuilding her life. She will be helped by an ex-Communist fixer a Polish nurse who doesn't speak a word of French a brainless petty criminal with a talent for sabotage an exiled German Jewish chemist a very expensive forger an opera singer with a handy flair for theatrics and her own son with ideas for a creative new business to take Paris by storm.

A brilliant imaginative free-falling caper through between-the-wars Paris and a portrait of Europe on the edge of disaster.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union


From the reviews for The Great Swindle

"The most purely enjoyable book I've read this year" Jake Kerridge Sunday Telegraph

"The vast sweep of the novel and its array of extraordinary secondary characters have attracted comparisons with the works of Balzac. Moving angry intelligent - and compulsive" Marcel Berlins The Times