The heroes of French writer Agnès Ledig’s novel “Marie in the Sky” are very down-to-earth people—only very different. Thirty-year-old Marie is a farmer, which means working eighteen hours a day with no vacation and no days off: you can’t tell the cows, “Bye! I’ll be back in a week.” Her only joy is her little daughter. The clumsy, withdrawn Olivier is a police officer in a rural district. Life hasn’t been kind to them: Marie’s mother abandoned her in early childhood; the girl was raised by her grandparents, while Olivier inherited only memories of his parents’ quarrels and a scar on his chin. Both dream of happiness, but each has skeletons in the closet, and their characters are anything but mild. And then—war is declared! The outcome is unclear.