I love a multigenerational family tale, one that sweeps across history and continents. And in that, this novel succeeds, with lovely writing, to boot. The story of the Cassar family is a fictional version of Messud’s own history, and hinges on the point at which her French Algerian family grapples with the history (and future) of colonialism around World War II. Messud’s own great grandfather wrote an in-depth family history, which would later take Messud (and her fictional counterpart within this novel) 20 years to […]
“You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.”
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud