Overview

In the aftermath of World War II, a young woman sent to a French village following an indiscretion discovers her hosts are guilty of an even greater sin. France's Loiret region, 1959. A student at Paris's Sorbonne University, Deidre is spending the summer in the countryside home of an aristocratic couple. It is an isolated oasis where her family has sent her to recover from a moment of weakness and avoid further scandal. Yet Madame Catherine and Monsieur Guy have their own secrets to hide, even as each seduces Deidre into their noble world and ways. However, no amount of glamor can exorcise the ghosts haunting the small town and its inhabitants, who live in the shadow of Pithiviers, where thousands of Jewish children were imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Diedre has found a diary written by two Jewish sisters who hid in her hosts' attic. But uncovering what happened to them leads her to truths she'd rather not face-truths about sacrifice in the name of survival. ""Intricate and endlessly surprising.... A beautiful and important book."" -Margot Livesey, New York Timesbestselling author ""Kohler's slim volume holds in its easy grasp the liveliness and corruption, the yearning and the evil that run just below our civilized skins."" -Time Out New York ""Artful... sensual and psychological... it stays with you like the words of the doomed children."" -The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Upon matriculation at seventeen, she left for Europe. Kohler lived for fifteen years in Paris, where she got married and completed an undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three children, she moved to the United States in 1981 and earned an MFA in writing at Columbia. Kohler has taught at The Writer's Voice, SUNY Purchase, Sarah Lawrence, Colgate, CCNY, Bennington, Columbia, and Princeton.

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