Fearing a Nazi invasion of Greece, Gaston sends Lucienne and the children to safety in Algeria, separating the family.

The Romanian consul's wife quietly tells Gaston he must leave her party now that France has fallen to the Nazis.

Gaston writes to his naval superiors and is reassigned from Greece to the safer post of Beirut.

François arrives at Amherst College and discovers he feels like an outsider among both American and French classmates.

A car drives into Denise deliberately on an Algiers street, an act of violence carried out by Algerian independence activists.

François meets Barbara at Oxford during the summer and the two fall quickly and deeply in love.

François and Barbara marry despite strong opposition from her parents, who distrust his French Algerian heritage and Catholicism.

François abandons his graduate studies in Middle Eastern history to pursue a business career and support his family.

Algeria wins independence from France, and Gaston and Lucienne are forced to leave the country they have always called home.

Denise attempts suicide in Paris after François and Barbara depart for the United States, leaving her without family nearby.

The entire Cassar family gathers in Toulon to celebrate Gaston and Lucienne's fiftieth wedding anniversary.

François begins secretly sipping vodka throughout each day to cope with his resentment, unhappiness, and failed ambitions.

Gaston dies in his Toulon apartment, and his body is laid out surrounded by flowers for several days.

François collapses in his bathroom, and doctors discover he has suffered a stroke with his esophageal cancer returning.

François dies in Connecticut, and Barbara, deep in neurological decline, seems unable to fully grasp that he is gone.

The novel opens as World War II forces the Cassar family apart, with Gaston sending Lucienne and the children from Greece to Algeria while he manages his diplomatic post alone. After the war, the younger generation navigates a new world: François studies in America and marries Barbara, while Algeria's successful independence movement forces Gaston, Lucienne, and Denise to permanently abandon the only home they have ever known. François sacrifices his academic dreams for a business career, and the family scatters across continents as relationships fray under the weight of resentment, cultural dislocation, and unfulfilled ambitions. The family gathers periodically—most memorably for Gaston and Lucienne's fiftieth anniversary in Toulon—but François grows increasingly unhappy and begins drinking secretly to cope. In the novel's final movement, Gaston dies in the Toulon apartment that has become the family's symbolic center, followed eventually by François, whose death leaves Barbara seemingly unable to comprehend the loss.

The Cassar family's displacement from World War II to its final generation.

Nine-year-old François writes a letter to his father in Greece, carefully omitting the family's difficult living conditions in Algeria.

François and his younger sister Denise help their mother dig a trench in the yard in preparation for possible airstrikes.

Gaston spends evenings with his Jewish landlord Hernandez, who reflects on centuries of displacement and the fragility of safety in Salonica.

François and two French university friends take a Christmas road trip to Miami and Havana, where he drinks too much and spends too much money.

Denise writes to François about an upcoming dance rather than sharing details of the violent car attack in Algiers.

Gaston travels to a remote Algerian oil outpost to address production problems while managing an international oil company.

Barbara returns to Canada to care for her ill father, and François accuses her of using the trip as an excuse to stay home.

Barbara's father dies, and she refuses to give François a date for when she will return to Geneva.

During his MBA program in Geneva, François strikes up a warm friendship with Larry Riley, who becomes his only true close friend.

With Barbara in law school, young Chloe and Loulou wait alone in the university cafeteria in Sydney until her classes end.

A classmate's brother drowns in the family pool, and Chloe finds herself wishing she could rewrite the story with a happy ending.

François phones Barbara from abroad to report that a workplace accident has killed two men and he cannot return home.

François and Barbara spend an entire vacation in Miami and Key West arguing, revealing the full depth of their marital unhappiness.

While Denise is in hospital for a procedure, Chloe reads her aunt's old journal and discovers a lifelong unrequited love for Jacques.

After returning from François's bedside, Denise strikes up an unlikely friendship with Magi, a Moroccan cleaning woman in her neighborhood.

Seen through smaller but telling scenes, this pool traces how the Cassar family's everyday lives reflect the larger forces of history and displacement. Young François writes carefully chosen letters home from war-disrupted Algeria, while Gaston quietly navigates postwar professional struggles in the oil industry, travelling constantly and missing his family. When Barbara and François build their life together, friction emerges early, deepened by her father's illness and death and by François's unhappy MBA program in Geneva, where he nonetheless forges his most important friendship. The family's nomadic existence continues in Sydney, where the children grow up largely on their own while their parents pursue separate ambitions, and later in Connecticut, where François and Barbara's marriage reaches a bitter low during a disastrous vacation. The pool closes with two emotionally charged revelations: Chloe's discovery of her aunt's lifelong secret heartbreak, and Denise finding unexpected kinship with a Moroccan neighbor after saying a difficult farewell to her dying brother.

The secondary moments that shaped the Cassar family's daily lives and relationships.

Young François writes that Paris is the heart of his nation, though he has never once set foot in France.

After Lucienne and the children leave for Algeria, Gaston writes to her every single day without ever receiving a reply.

At Amherst, François's fraternity brothers confess they were worried he would be Arab when they heard he was French and Algerian.

Denise observes nationalist and communist stirrings among Muslim students at her Algiers law school but writes François about a dance instead.

While caring for her dying father in Canada, Barbara wonders whether her parents were right about François all along.

Denise settles in Paris after Algerian independence and endures discrimination from native-born French people who stigmatize her as a pied-noir.

Denise quits her job at Fraulein Lili's Buenos Aires bookstore after Lili suggests she might be a lesbian.

Barbara discovers the women's liberation movement in Sydney and undergoes a personal transformation through her law school studies.

Gaston observes during his Sydney visit that François would have preferred a scholarly life of writing over a career in business.

Word arrives that Denise has been in a mysterious single-car accident, and Gaston and Lucienne cut short their Sydney stay to fly home.

Gaston stuns Chloe by admitting colonialism was exploitative and comparing France's project to the settler histories of the US and Australia.

Crossing the English Channel by ferry, Chloe resolves to become a writer and reflects on her family's extraordinary nomadic journey.

Watching over Gaston's declining body in Toulon, Barbara realizes she and François were always destined to remain together.

Before leaving François's bedside, Denise makes him promise to receive the last rites, and he quietly agrees.

The Epilogue reveals that Gaston and Lucienne were nephew and aunt, a secret the entire family buried and never spoke of again.

This pool focuses on the internal and revelatory moments that alter the course of characters' lives, beginning with young François confronting what it means to be French when he has never once visited France. As the family disperses, each character faces a private reckoning: Denise quietly absorbs the political violence around her rather than alarm her family, while François discovers at Amherst that even his French peers see him as an outsider, and Barbara begins to question her marriage from its earliest strains. The middle section captures Denise's repeated failures to find a foothold after Algeria's independence, Gaston's Sydney visit revealing his quiet understanding of his son's thwarted ambitions, and Barbara's personal transformation through women's liberation. The pool closes with a series of significant reckonings: Gaston's stunning admission that colonialism was exploitative, Chloe's decision to become a writer, Barbara's quiet acceptance of her fate, and Denise's final act of devotion at her brother's deathbed, before the Epilogue delivers the family's long-buried secret.

The private reckonings, discoveries, and emotional shifts that define three generations of Cassars.