One morning in the dead of winter, during the darkest years of World War II, three German soldiers head out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders with tracking down and bringing back for execution "one of them" a Jew. Having flushed out a young man hiding in the woods, they decide to rest in an abandoned house before continuing their journey back to the camp. As they prepare food, they are joined by a passing Pole whose virulent anti-Semitism adds tension to an already charged atmosphere. Before long, the group's sympathies begin to splinter when each man is forced to confront his own conscience as the moral implications of their murderous mission become clear.


Called "masterly and necessary" by the Times Literary Supplement, A Meal in Winter recalls the claustrophobia of Roman Polanski's The Pianist and Louis Begley's Wartime Lies. A sleeper hit in the United Kingdom, this is the first novel by the award-winning French novelist Hubert Mingarelli to be translated into English.

Translated by: Sam Taylor