The Propagandist

The New Yorker Best Books of 2024 and World Literature Today Notable Translations of 2024 "Cécile Desprairies's novel, The Propagandist, is full of so many secrets that it's a wonder she managed to write it all."--The New York Times In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War II, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones. Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did the narrator's relatives zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupiers of France, even remaining for decades afterward obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause?

Cécile Desprairies is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. The author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime, she was born in Paris in 1957. The Propagandist is her first novel.