Girl at the Lion d’Or

In 1936, Anne Louvet leaves Paris for a job as a maid at the faded Hotel du Lion d’Or on the Breton coast. She is trying to live beyond a family disgrace and a private past she cannot openly explain. At the hotel she meets Charles Hartmann, an older married man whose own losses and political unease draw him into Anne’s life. The novel follows their relationship within a provincial France shaped by memory, class, secrecy and the growing instability of the years before the Second World War.