When we first meet Daniel, he lives in an isolated house in Ireland with his wonderfully peculiar wife, Claudette, and their two children, Marithe and Calvin. When he hears that Nicola Janks has died on the radio, he cannot but go to England and investigate his former lover's death. While Daniel knows everything about his wife's own secret as a former actress and film director, he never told her about Nicola.
We then embark on a shuttle sailing through places and time periods to find out about Daniel's and Claudette's lives before and after they first meet.
This must be the place is teeming with lives and secrets, Daniel's grand-mother dies neglecting to tell the family where her husband was buried, his American children are denied access to their father until their teen years, Claudette's former career is kept from her younger children.
My favourite scene: Ari, Daniel's stepson, is to meet with the school counsellor who imagines the frightened and most probably angry teenager waiting for him behind his office door. Instead, he sees "a figure in dark clothes seated in the armchair [...]. One foot balanced on the opposite knee, a newspaper balanced on his lap, where a crossword was being filled in with a gold fountain pen [...] it made him look as though he had stepped out of the pages of a French novel"