The Gold and the Ashes

Who killed Carl Rudolf Schiller, a world-renowned Berlin theologian whose corpse has been meticulously cut in half? This is the enigma that Raphaël Zimmer, a young historian specializing in the Second World War, agrees to investigate at the urging of his friend Félix Werner, a tenacious journalist. Their inquiry takes them from Paris to Washington, from Rome to Berlin, on a long journey through the European conscience.

As they delve deeper, Jewish and Catholic theologians, historians, camp survivors, resistance fighters, and former collaborators offer fragments of a truth that constantly eludes them. Then enters Lisa Perlman, a sculptor of luminous presence whom Raphaël falls for, and whose family seems to hold a decisive piece of the secret. Behind the murder looms a much larger question: that of stolen gold—from banks and extracted teeth—and that of ashes: what remains when names and bodies have been erased.

Constructed as a thriller, Gold and Ashes is also a philosophical inquiry into Evil. Éliette Abécassis examines the boundary, sometimes less clear than one might think, between victim and perpetrator; silence and speech in the face of the Shoah; the faith that endures and the faith that falters. How does Evil incarnate itself in History, and how does it continue, after the catastrophe, to weave its way through the world?

The author’s second novel following the international success of Qumran, this book confirms Éliette Abécassis's signature style: a fiction of tension and ideas, where suspense becomes the vehicle to address the most essential questions of our time.