This is an engrossing and sensitive depiction of the complexities of human lives lived during the German occupation of France during the Second World War. It’s made all the more poignant by the fate of the author, who was arrested and died at Auschwitz in 1942. Her notes accompanying the manuscript reveal that she had envisioned an even more sweeping and ambitious work, but that she sensed that her time was running out. The novel’s appendices, detailing her notes and the correspondence of her last days and that of her family and colleagues as they tried to find and rescue her, are as riveting as the novel.