The first of Céline's late novels about the end of the Second World War, written as a semi-autobiographical account. The narrator, a doctor and writer, recalls fleeing France in 1944 and ending up with other collaborators and officials in the German town of Sigmaringen, where the Vichy government in exile was housed in a castle. Around him are rivalries, hunger, gossip and fear as the regime collapses. Céline writes in a jumpy, comic and self-pitying voice, and the book offers a strange, unreliable view of a ruined world.