A Question Of Loyalties

This superb book engages with all the complexities and ambiguities of loyalty, nationality, love and duty as they are put under threat by betrayal, by errors of judgement, or just by friendship in the historical wound that was occupied France. Etienne de Balafre, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father Lucien - was he a patriot who may have served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government? This subtle and moving novel, rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, explores the ties between fathers and sons and the pains of love and duty in a period in European history that is still characterised by wilful denial and hatred.