This Strange Eventful History

Written by Claire Messud

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force … one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).

“A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud’s epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become ‘colonized’ by family.”—Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Netanyahus

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781980036234

Claire Messud

Claire Messud was educated at Yale and Cambridge. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters , were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life , was a Publishers' Weekly Best Book of the Year; all three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship and the Straus Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with her husband and children.