Léon and Louise

Two young people fall in love, but the war tears them apart. When they next meet up again in Paris, Louise is leading an independent life while Léon has long been married. This is a grand amour - one which survives against all the odds.

"My grandfather was seventeen years old when he first met Louise Janvier. I like to imagine him as the young man he was then, in the spring of 1918, as he strapped his reinforced cardboard suitcase onto the back of his bicycle and left his father's house in Cherbourg forever…" This is how Alex Capus begins recounting a love story destined to end only with Léon Le Gall's funeral service on 16th April 1986 in Notre Dame. It is the story of sixty-eight years in the lives of two people who never actually get together, but who nevertheless are the most enchanting of couples. It begins with their first encounter, on the Atlantic coast during the First World War, shortly after which they are forcefully torn apart by an air raid. Each assumes the other has been killed. Léon goes on to marry but Louise, passionate in nature and driven by her fierce desire for independence, goes her own way - until 1928, when they encounter one another again quite by chance on the Paris Métro.

With delightful deftness of touch and great intensity, Alex Capus tells a love story played out during a century of war. He tells of two people who pit themselves against the passage of time, in often magical ways; who hold on tightly to their love, flying in the face of all convention; who lead a wayward, often unbelievably comical double life. Léon and Louise are an unforgettable couple in the realm of contemporary literature.