This Strange, Eventful HistoryThis Strange, Eventful History

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the Pieds-Noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state--separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This novel is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of Fraṅois and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of Fraṅois's union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.