A stranger for ever A family's struggles after the second world war are intimately captured across continents and generations

Here are some of the events that are not described in Claire Messud's ambitious novel about the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family: the Algerian war of independence, as a result of which the Cassar family lose their home and national identity; the two years the family's most promising scion spends as a student in Paris, during which he endures something (racist bullying? Mental collapse?) that blights his adult life; his sister's broken-hearted suicide attempt; the courtship of a couple who have been held up throughout the novel as exemplars of married love and yet whose relationship - as we discover in the final pages - was shockingly transgressive.

- Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Any of these developments could have provided more than enough material for the plot of a lesser novel. Here they take place off stage.

Messud's story, which she tells in episodes separated by a decade or so, begins in 1940 in Salonica (now Thessaloniki), as the Germans sweep into France and Gaston Cassar hears General de Gaulle make his broadcast calling on those French still "free" to join him and carry on the fight (Gaston doesn't heed the call, and will be haunted by that choice). She ends 70 years later, in 2010, in Connecticut, as Gaston's son dies in a hospice, tended by a Haitian nurse whose name, like his, alludes to a language and nationality foisted on them by colonial history.