Irreverent, witty and often barmy novel about how people make sense of war. Begins in 1940 with a young woman running naked down the boulevard du Montparnasse.
An Alpine hotel with a room missing, a private bank in Switzerland, skullduggery over an inheritance, a ravishing young woman - just some of the layers in this fiendish onion of a novel.
The spark for this remarkable memoir was a scribbled list of paintings that belonged to the Parisian author's great-grandparents - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Tiepolo etc - of which she knew nothi... read more