The Wife of Martin Guerre

The name Martin Guerre may make you think of Gerard Depardieu (who played him in a 1982 movie), but his story, based on true events in the 16th century when a stranger appeared in a French village and claimed to be the man who had abandoned his family there years before, has been told many times before, perhaps best by Janet Lewis in this short 1941 novel, which distills not only Guerre's bizarre tale but the everyday strangeness of a rural wife's existence in fewer than a hundred tense, surprising, and beautifully observed pages.