A prize-winning novel based on the life of Charlotte Salomon: a “searing portrait of a brilliant artist” who persisted despite the horrors of WWII (Kirkus).
Obsessed with art, and with living, Charlotte Salomon attended school in Germany until she was forced to flee. In France, Charlotte was interned in work camp which she narrowly escaped. She then spent the next two years in almost total solitude, creating a series of artworks—images, words, even musical scores—that tell her life story.
Before Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six, she entrusted her life's work to a friend, who kept it safe until peacetime. In Charlotte, David Foenkinos—with passion, life, humor, and intelligent observation—has written his own utterly original tribute to Charlotte Salomon's tragic life and transcendent art. First published to critical acclaim in France, Foenkinos’s hauntingly redemptive novel is masterfully translated by Sam Taylor.
Winner of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens
David Foenkinos is an award-winning French novelist and screenwriter. Charlotte, inspired by the life of Charlotte Salomon, won the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens; it has sold more than half a million copies in France and been translated into nineteen languages. Sam Taylor previously translated HHhH, by Laurent Binet, and is the author of the novels The Island at the End of the World, The Amnesiac and The Republic of Trees. He lives in France and the United States. Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin, 1917. Unknown in her lifetime, she was one of Germany's great modern artists. Her greatest achievement was Life? or Theatre? A Song-play - an autobiographical series of 769 works, which she painted over two years in the South of France while in hiding from the Nazis. It has gone on to inspire films, plays and an opera. Salomon died in Auschwitz in 1943, gassed along with her unborn child shortly after her arrival.