The contemporary French novelist and film-maker Philippe Claudel has achieved greater recognition in the Anglophone world recently through the beautiful but harrowing film I've Loved You So Long. Claudel wrote and direc-ted the film in which Kristin Scott Thomas plays a newly released prisoner who has served time for murdering her child.

In France Claudel is a bestselling author: his novel Grey Souls, set in two French factory towns in 1917, within earshot of the trenches, won the 2003 Prix Renaudot and has been translated into 31 languages. His new novel, Brodeck's Report, is set in the aftermath of the Second World War and revisits the themes of life, death, guilt, innocence and murder that have dominated his work.

Brodeck's Report has one of the most moving dedications of any novel I've read: “For all those who think they're nothing. For my wife and my daughter, without whom I wouldn't be much.” It is, perhaps, unusual to begin a review by quoting a novel's dedication page, but in this case any clue as to how Claudel came to write such an original, brilliant and disturbing book is welcome.

The narrator is Brodeck, who has been commissioned to write a report on the savage murder of an eccentric artist, an outsider, De Anderer, who came to live at an inn in Brodeck's remote rural village, somewhere in Europe, at the foot of the mountains. When De Anderer arrived the village was traumatised by the crimes and betrayals of the war. The artist set about sketching the villagers and their beautiful natural surroundings. His portraits were alive: Brodeck stood before his own and found it “an opaque mirror that threw back into my face all that I had been and all that I was”. Other villagers found the same, and for this they murdered De Anderer.

Brodeck asserts in the novel's first line: “I had nothing to do with it.” The report that his fellow villagers insist that Brodeck must write is not the text of the novel. Instead, what the reader is given is a secret, personal, compromising report that draws Brodeck back into his own horrific past. He was one of many taken to a death camp, one of the few to survive and return home.

The camp is evoked through its depraved rituals. Above the entrance gate there is a hanged corpse with a sign around its neck: “Ich bin nichts” (I am nothing). Every morning the guards make the prisoners stand in ranks while a new victim is chosen to climb the ladder, remove the corpse, dig its grave, hang the sign around his own neck and then be hanged above the gate. The wife of the camp commandant attends every day, cradling her nursing baby in her arms. She watches the executions with an intense rapture that earns her the name Die Zeilenesseniss (The Woman who Eats Souls).

The ways in which bodies and souls can be snuffed out into nothingness is painstakingly explored in Brodeck's Report. It is a relentless, uncomfortable book that achieves a beauty of its own through Claudel's deft writing and passionate commitment to truth. Claudel is a novelist of ideas, in the French tradition. He deals skilfully in archetypes and abstractions. His characters and their village are sparsely sketched, just like the De Anderer portraits and landscapes that cause such fatal offence.

I've Loved You So Long was certainly an upsetting film, but it was also life-affirming and celebratory. The same, ultimately, can be said of Brodeck's Report but, in this case, the journey towards affirmation is as bleak and dark as can be, a journey that goes to the heart of what it means to be human, responsible and committed to the truth. A journey towards what it means to live a life that is something rather than nothing at all.

Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel translated by John Cullen
Quercus, £18.99 Buy the book

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist