Claire Messud’s New Novel Maps the Search for a Home That Never Was

The Cassars will need such a love. Their country will disappear yet again, seemingly in the blink of an eye—as it always feels to people who have not been watching closely. Gaston, Lucienne, and their two small children are pieds noirs, people of European descent born in French colonial Algeria. In 1962, Algeria won its independence from France. Afterward, eight hundred thousand pieds noirs—nearly all those still remaining (many had begun to flee as the fighting intensified in the years prior)—left the country for France alongside tens of thousands of Harkis, Muslim Algerians who had fought for the French colonial government. Once in the metropole, the pieds noirs were regarded as alien interlopers from the fringes, dirtied by the dirty work of empire. And so, even though Gaston goes straight to his wife, the novel is an odyssey tale. Without a country, the Cassar children traverse the globe, from Paris to Sydney, Havana to Toulon, seeking all-consuming love affairs, desperate to belong to someone, if not to some place. They want to claim and be claimed, with little concern for whose home they might be wrecking.