A retired New York professor's life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera in hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets.

'An important, touching novel that stays with you long after you're done reading it' Independent

Noah hasn't been to Nice since he was a young boy. Now, he is only days away from his first trip back when he receives a phone call from a social worker looking for a temporary home for Michael, Noah's eleven-year-old grandson. Though he has never met Michael, he is talked into taking him along to France.

The unlikely pair end up arguing about everything from steak haché to screen time, and the long-awaited trip is quickly becoming a disaster. But as Michael's youthful determination helps Noah unearth troubling details about their shared past, they soon find they are more akin than they knew. A funny, heart-wrenching story about coming home again, how to unpick a painful story and begin to write one anew.

'A delicate and moving reminder of the way in which our human stories are made from practical choices - often in life as well as in literature' Harper's Bazaar

Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction