The Black Garden-Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Yves, forty-three, married with children, is settled into a dull but placid Parisian existence. Sigrid is thirty-six, all sharp edges, haunted by the past, and hunted by Israeli agents who are searching for her father, once a Nazi doctor at Dachau. On a deserted beach at Deauville in mid-winter, these two incredibly dissimilar people meet. Their encounter begins a moving and expertly written story by one of France's most accomplished novelists.

Christine Arnothy, author of I am Fifteen and I Don't Want to Die, weaves a poignant tale of the time Yves and Sigrid spend together, a time filled with the bizarre contrasts in their memories and ambitions - Yves's ordinary and undistinguished role in the war, the horrors of Sigrid's childhood in wartime Germany, with its terrifying hints of her father's role at Dachau. Theirs is a strange interlude, interrupted only by calls from Yves's wife and from an Israeli agent, badgering Sigrid for information about her father's whereabouts. And then their interlude is over - but not their effect on each other. Their wrenching influence on one another's lives brings this novel to a startling conclusion.