Julien Gracq 
A Dark Stranger 

A surreal nouveau-Gothic tale of death in a 1920s seaside hotel.Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920's Brittany. The other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is – that Death has come to spend the summer with them. Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan – an uncannily contemporary figure – gradually disintegrates. His death seems to symbolize the end of a generation, the approach of war.That Gracq wrote this oblique, prescient novel in a remote German prisoner-of-war camp makes its carefree jazz age setting particularly poignant.