'The day after I turned fifteen, I finally discovered what I'd always known.' Growing up in post-war Paris, the sickly only child of glamorous parents, the narrator invents a make-believe brother - older, stronger, more brilliant than he can ever be. It is only when he talks to a family friend that he discovers his imaginary sibling had a real predecessor: a half-brother whose death in the camps is part of a buried family secret he was never intended to unearth. A family haunted by secrets of the past: an illicit love, a lost child, a devastating betrayal dating back to WWII - a novel based on the author's own family and already a bestseller in Europe.