This superb book engages with all the complexities & ambiguities of loyalty nationality love & duty as they are put under threat by betrayal by errors of judgement or just by friendship in the historical wound that was occupied France. Etienne de Balafre half French half English & raised in South Africa returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father Lucien
- was he a patriot who may have served his country as best he could in difficult times or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government? This subtle & moving novel rife with the anguish of hindsight & the irony of circumstance explores the ties between fathers & sons & the pains of love & duty in a period in European history that is still characterised by wilful denial & hatred.