**NATIONAL BESTSELLER - BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST - From the internationally
acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient "an
elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale"
(The Washington Post) set in the decade after World War II that
tells the dramatic story of two teenagers and an eccentric group of
characters.
**
In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed
and luminous at once--we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel,
and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they
stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them
in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might
be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as
they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by
a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom
seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather
unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who
they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother
returns after months of silence without their father, explaining
nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to
uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is
this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he
narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.
