Agota Kristof trilogy

Claus and Lucas are twins. Their new life begins when they are left with their grandmother, the ‘Witch’, in a village in an occupied country. It’s wartime. All their actions are based on the necessity to survive. They create an exercise regime to toughen up, and record the results in a notebook. Their angelic looks are deceiving. They are implacable, dangerously ethical; their code of life demands that they help a deserter, or blackmail a priest, or come to the aid of a prostitute, or assist in a suicide. What motivates them is a deeply embedded morality of absolute need. The trilogy – ‘The Notebook’ (1986), ‘The Proof’ (1988) and ‘The Third Lie’ (1991) – follows their stories from the Second World War, through the years of communism and into a fractured Europe.