This Strange Eventful History

Messud''s gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping . . . Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature''s best

Autorentext
Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The author of five other works of fiction including, most recently, The Burning Girl, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

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'Magnificent' Financial Times, a Best Book of 2024

'An epic family odyssey' Guardian, Book of the Day

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 is the 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 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, This Strange Eventful History is an immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

'Wise and insightful' The Times, Book of the Day

'Almost unbearably moving' Observer