First published 1993
Thérèse and Léonie spend their childhood together in a sturdy Normandy house where silence fills the rooms like dust. The French and English cousins notice how the adults stop talking when they enter a room. They see how the servants avoid certain topics. In the woods behind the house, they discover a damaged shrine hidden beneath the earth. The girls create elaborate stories to explain what they find. They imagine reasons for the guilty quiet that surrounds them. Their games and fantasies accidentally expose a village secret that has festered since the war. The shame they uncover will follow both cousins into adulthood. Roberts captures the textures of French country life through the eyes of children who understand more than the adults realize. The novel moves between the cousins' innocent curiosity and the darker truths that shaped their family's past.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Normandy, France
Period: 20th Century, 21st Century
194 pages · Hardcover · Virago Press (UK)