Mathias Énard talks to Chris Power

French novelist Mathias Énard has won many international awards including the Prix Goncourt for his novels Zone, Street of Thieves and Compass. He talks to writer and Guardian literary critic Chris Power about his latest novel The Deserters, which vividly lays bare the devastations of war.

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life.

Aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend.

Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict comes to light: commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival.