It is 1917 on the Western front and a young girl has been murdered. The village dwellers and those in charge of justice all have an opinion, and it's the narrator's task to find out what happened.

"Claudel writes with a heart-gripping, melancholy beauty about this death-ridden spot (...) Oddly, for a book so infused with material and moral mists, every minor character and setting stands out in sharp relief. This is a gem of a novel, but a gem that carries a curse. It evokes above all the emotional climate of total war." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

"This is a book that hits the ground brooding. (...) This elaboration of the obvious becomes a kind of mania. Claudel's compulsion to explain himself seems, peculiarly, far more powerful than his hero's urge to solve the murder. Although By a Slow River features several violent deaths and much emotional brutality, and contains in its final pages a couple of shocking revelations, the novel is curiously undisturbing. (...) Claudel seems to want to investigate the very mystery of life, but he's too worried that we might not understand exactly what he's doing. He winds up simply eviscerating it." - Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review