The summary is pretty vague. Basically, Samuel (whose name isn't mentioned once in the entire 285 pages) is a writer. He's from Ireland and the book opens in his home country at his mother's home. He has a past experience of going to France for inspiration only to have been attacked (?) and stabbed, nursed back to health by a woman named Suzanne. His whole past before this point is mentioned but there are no details about why he got attacked or by whom or how long he'd been in France when this happened. Anyway- he recovered barely, went home to Ireland but his mother's judgemental attitude and constant criticism for his life choices make him yearn to get back to France. Ireland holds no inspiration for him. He dreams of Paris and Suzanne.
His cousins, Sheila and Mollie, (and Sheila's two daughters) are visiting. They turn on the radio to hear that a war has officially broken out. The start of World War II if you hadn't noticed the summary above.
Sheila, then Mollie leaves. Sheila goes home to see her husband before he ships out. Mollie returns to work. He takes himself to France.
In Paris, things start to get worse. This is where the book takes confusing turns. The author is very wordy. She doesn't specify who she's talking about when she writes "he" so always assume it's Samuel and you'll get through it much easier than I did. There's alot of vague references to the Jews being rounded up and taken to concentration camps.
A couple of points that were interesting to me, were that the Allied Forces used radio broadcast to relay secret messages during the war. So even though the Germans could've been listening, they used such abstract messages intended only to make sense to the person it's meant for, that the Germans couldn't figure it out.
It didn't occur to me either that people other than the Jews were persecuted, tortured and executed. Half of the book finds Samuel and Suzanne on the run because he has taken part in relaying messages to the Allied Forces. So he's committed treason and there are alot of instances where they are running constantly in a country where a vast majority of people are trying to escape German tyranny. You find Samuel hidden under the floorboards of a safe house during the day and only allowed a free moment at night. You find he and Suzannne trekking across the French countryside multiple times on their way to safer destinations because the trains would be stopped and searched or simply so packed with evacuees that it was impossible to obtain seats. They were hungry because of the rations put on the country, starving, sickly and barely putting one foot in front of the other in order to live another day.
Their safe houses are with friends but even those friends start to "disappear", taken by the Gestapo for questioning... Never to return. So as they move from place to place, their time with friends will start out pleasant and then shrink to a bubble on the verge of popping. The book spans the length of the war.
There are some things to look out for... A companion of Samuel's in a time that he and Suzanne are separated for safety's sake, is almost captured by the Gestapo and instead of allowing himself to be captured, tortured and executed, throws himself out a window. There's also a very brief paragraph where Samuel encounters and engages a prostitute. The language bounces around. You can have three chapters void of swearing and then be blasted in the forth.
So overall... It is not something I would read again. I struggled to get into it because it was so wordy and long and really vague. But I learned some things about France in WWII and about the people who lived there, which I appreciated.
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