Hélène, jeune étudiante en médecine, est amoureuse de l'aspirant musicien Pierre Regnier, dont le père, un chirurgien de renom, l'exhorte à abandonner la musique pour la médecine. Incapable de résister à son père, Pierre se tue, incitant la Madeleine en deuil à oublier la romance et à consacrer sa vie à la guérison.

The retelling of June 6, 1944, from the perspectives of the Germans, US, British, Canadians, and the Free French. Marshall Erwin Rommel, touring the defenses being established as part of the Reich's Atlantic Wall, notes to his officers that when the Allied invasion comes they must be stopped on the beach. "For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day"

Duras's first work of short fiction, Des journées entières dans les arbres (Whole Days in the Trees and Other Stories), was published in 1954. Consisting of four stories, Des journées entières dans les arbres touches on several themes that Duras explored more fully in her later work—particularly the developing sexuality of young women—but in form and structure is more similar to her earlier works, which tend to be realistic and conventionally structured.