Set in the rain-swept province of Brittany, Of Illustrious Men by Jean Rouaud (Harvill Press, IR14.99, ISBN 1 86046 007 0) is the story of a spirited Resistance fighter surviving the war to endure the life of a travelling salesman.

Rouaud traces the tenuous webs of this man's family to find memories of mass trauma: the Nazi invasion; a savage bombing of Nantes; and the post-war destruction of the medieval Breton landscape.

This limpid, elegaic novel excavates its domestic material to reveal the tender scars of a nation whose writers, in giving the world great art and ideas, have neglected provincial mysteries for the cosmopolitan allure of Paris.