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.