ESTA EXTRAÑA Y AZAROSA HISTORIA

This novel, undoubtedly Claire Messud's best and most ambitious to date, covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family, the Cassars: that of the patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them while overwhelming their children, François and Denise, siblings united by the abnormality of their family; that of François's marriage to Barbara, a woman so culturally different that they can barely understand each other; and that of their daughters Loulou and Chloe, who try to reconstruct and make sense of a past hidden amid the social and political turmoil of the 20th century. Beginning in Larbaâ, Algeria, in 1940 and ending in Connecticut in 2010, via Thessaloniki, Buenos Aires, Sydney, and the French Riviera, the story is told alternately from the points of view of five of the characters.