This Strange Eventful History

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the Cassar family is buffeted by conflict, struggling to find its feet - separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all.

This Strange Eventful History is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by her own family's history, Claire Messud animates her characters' rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. This Strange Eventful History is an immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history.

Review

This epic family saga, which stretches from Algeria in 1927 to Connecticut in 2010 . . . [is a] wise and insightful novel about identity and family, and how love can stifle as well as comfort ― The Times, Book of the Day

An epic family odyssey . . . Ambitious and compelling . . . What gives this novel its exceptional vitality is that Messud never allows collective issues to take precedence over individual lives . . . Not only do they live - thanks to the novel's bold reach and multiple viewpoints, they change . . . Slowly, and only ever partially, we are allowed to glimpse the traumas and tensions and the intensely private joys that have shaped these people's existences . . . This is a big novel spanning continents and generations, but it also has the essential small virtues of precision and imaginative sympathy ― Guardian Book of the Day

A rich, sprawling saga . . . This Strange Eventful History may be Messud's finest book ― Sunday Telegraph

This continent-hopping, multigenerational saga certainly lives up to its title . . . Evocative and richly characterised ― Financial Times, Best Summer Books of 2024

A novel of how families are scattered across borders by the uncontrollable forces of history . . . a fascinating and wise work. It is about a family, but it is also about the inexorable sands of time which slip through our fingers from one minute to the next ― Sunday Independent

In her fiction Ms Messud has excelled at exploring human connections in all their complexity... This Strange Eventful History examines family ties on a grand scale...Though the book is ambitious in its scope, it is also intimate, probing characters' secrets and lies, tarnished dreams and missed opportunities... this is a masterful novel about people who are "buffeted by history" - but also shaped by it ― Economist

Magnificent and multi-layered, hearty and heartbreaking . . . a generation-spanning, continent-hopping family saga ― Financial Times

Wonderfully enjoyable, intelligent, perceptive, moving . . . written with such affection and understanding, such an awareness of the passing of time and of the unavoidably bruising nature of experience which is nevertheless redeemed by love, loyalty, and kindness . . . It is indeed rare to come upon a novel which offers such a cornucopia of pleasure, such a sense of the physical world and the reality of experience ― Scotsman

Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family's story into a tour de force inThis Strange Eventful History . . . all around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies . . . all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak ― Vogue

About the Author

Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The author of five other works of fiction including, most recently, The Burning Girl, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.