We think we know our loved ones. What if we didn’t really know them at all?
In February 1993, Paul des Tures is found dead in his car with a shotgun in his hand. An accident? Suicide? Who was this man whose death makes the local headlines? Louise, his eldest daughter, describes her father: an entrepreneur brimming with ideas he never sees through, a mercurial husband and father who’s always running late and short of money.
She ends up finding out that her father was living a double life. He was in love with a woman under whose loving gaze he could finally be himself without being judged, away from the world of provincial aristocracy in which he grew up. He left behind an inconsolable son painfully like him, a half-brother Louise will come to know.
Caroline de Bodinat is a newspaper journalist, and author of a first novel called Marâtre. This caustic, uncompromising and sometimes funny second book condemns social hypocrisy and throws a hand grenade into family secrets.