Sursis

Set in the days when war seemed about to engulf the continent, this novel moves through Paris and across Europe in late September 1938, as the Munich crisis unsettles everyone it touches. Its characters live with a dread that their ordinary routines cannot hide. Through them, Sartre examines what it means to choose one's own path when the future has been taken out of one's hands.

The book is the second volume of the Roads to Freedom trilogy, following The Age of Reason. Its central figure is Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher whose attempts to live by his principles are tested by the political climate around him. The narrative follows him and several companions as they confront uncertainty about what they owe to others and to themselves.

Written by the French philosopher and novelist, the work is aimed at adult readers interested in existentialist fiction, pre-war European history and philosophical questions about freedom and responsibility.