This Strange Eventful History, longlisted for the Booker Prize, is Claire Messud's inspired and erudite epic recounting of seven decades of a pied-noir family--those of European descent born in Algeria before the country's 1962 independence from France. The story of the Cassars, based on Messud's family, begins in 1940, when military attaché Gaston is sent to Greece to find out what "the fascist Italians" are "up to in Albania." He feels "trapped in this remote and irrelevant backwater," in part because he misses his family, including wife Lucienne, with whom he struggles to maintain an aura of an ideal marriage, and their two children: François, the older child, and Denise, who fears the Nazis plan to kill their father.
Messud (The Woman Upstairs; The Burning Girl) follows her characters through multiple locales, from Algeria to Toronto, Buenos Aires to Sydney. Her chronicle of one family's history, the political events that shape them, and "these strange, beautiful, appalling times" in which they live is as fine a family saga as one will read. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer