Winner of the 2024 Deborah Pease Prize • A
Kirkus
Reviews Best Book of 2024 Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize  One of
Oprah Daily's
Most Anticipated Books of 2024 • One of
New York
magazine's "23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024" • One of
The Guardian
's "Books to Look Out for in 2024" • One of
The Globe & Mail
's Most Anticipated Books of 2024 • One of
BookPage
's Most Anticipated fiction of 2024 • One of
Literary Hub
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Book Riot
's "Most Anticipated Books of 2024" An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.
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 Strange Eventful History
, told with historical sweep, 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 François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’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.
Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive,
is “a tour de force…one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).