A haunting tale of war, love and loss from the author of Birdsong and A Week in December The Sunday Times bestseller On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host is Alexander Pereira, a man who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does. The search for the past takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally unforgettably back into the trenches of the Western Front. This moving novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulkss most remarkable book yet.