The French List: Someone's Trying to Find You (Hardcover)

As he is leaving a cinema, where he has just been watching one of his all-time favourite films Casablanca, Julien, a recently retired teacher, is approached by a young woman. He isn’t aware that the woman, Claire, has been following him for several days. She tells him that a mysterious ‘someone’ is trying to find him and that she, as a practitioner of the little-known science of ‘narrative psychology’, is acting as the anonymous individual’s intermediary. Little by little, Julien comes to play along with her ‘investigation’, not least because the primly turned out young woman intrigues him.

A strange odyssey through Julien’s past ensues, as the odd couple meet in Paris cafes to mull over the events of a life lived on the fringes of various major events of twentieth-century French history: the Occupation and Liberation, the Algerian war, 1968.

Julien has a failed marriage to relate, together with an enigmatic tale of a romantic encounter in one of the seedier parts of Berlin, but which of the many people he has encountered in his life could be looking for him? And why exactly is he playing this strange confessional game with the young woman with the worried smile?

He soon realizes that he knows nothing about Claire. Is she really the ingénue she seems to be, or is she playing a role? Why the intensity in her questioning? Is she really working for someone else, and if so who could that be? And why does she ask so many questions about one particular year—1968?

The puzzling nature of Claire’s quest proves to be a metaphor for other enigmas. And the theme of detection and investigation subtly opens out to encompass other mysteries of the human heart.