This Strange Eventful History: A Novel

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • Winner of the 2024 Deborah Pease Prize


A 2024 New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book • One of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2024 • A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 • A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 • A Financial Times Best Book of 2024 • A Vogue Best Book of 2024 • An Oprah Daily Best book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read of 2024 • A Literary Hub Best Book of 2024 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024 • A Bookpage Best Book of the Year • A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year • A Booklist Best Book of 2024


An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force…one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).