Charlotte

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 Lycéens; 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.

I am deeply, deeply affected by this sad, beautiful, indignant, wrenching, important book . . . It is an artistic privilege and (I think) almost a moral duty that you all read this