This Strange Eventful History: A Novel

by Claire Messud

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The author of The Burning Girl and The Emperor's Children takes us from WWII to modern times in this multigenerational family saga. A sweeping tale of history and time, this is great for fans of Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach.

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 Publishers 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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635041
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hometown:

Somerville, MA, USA

Place of Birth:

Greenwich, CT, USA

Education:

BA in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1987, MA in English Literature, Jesus College, Cambridge University, 1989

Editorial Reviews

"The always incredible Claire Messud's own history helped inspire this engrossing story, which follows a complicated family—as if there were any other kind—across decades and around the world, as legends are made, secrets are buried, and truths come out in the most unexpected of ways. It's a touching, skillfully crafted work that reminds us of the ongoing stories of which we're all a part."

Town & Country - Emily Burack and Adam Rathe

"The big questions are here, about family and colonialism and grief. But the real promise of a 425-page family epic is that it will provide an emotional punch, too. On that, it delivers…The idea that literature itself can offer absolution may be as quaint and passé these days as the Great American Novel, but Messud’s steady belief in it is intoxicating. "Literary language is a kind of spell," she writes in the introduction of her 2020 essay collection. Similar to one character’s "beautiful French, like his cravat, somewhat old-fashioned, but so elegant," her style comes to seem like a purposeful constraint. This Strange Eventful History might use some old tricks, but it’s hard not to be hypnotized"

New York Magazine - Emma Alpern

"This Strange Eventful History is richly textured with a diverse highlight reel of the 20th century: French and Algerian politics, Cuban night life in the early 1950s, the global impact of the aluminum and steel industries… But perhaps the most striking aspect of this novel is how Messud conveys loneliness in its many forms. There is an apartness within each of these characters even as they are tightly knotted to each other’s lives… [A] masterfully written novel."

WBUR - Carol Iaciofano Aucoin

"Messud’s strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them."

The Atlantic - Tope Folarin

"One of the giants of American fiction… Her latest novel charts a sweeping story about a family of pieds-noirs (people of European descent born in Algeria during French occupation of the country) over the course of seven decades, where each generation influences, and arguably poisons, the next."

Bloomberg - James Tarmy

"This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment—rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family—and we suspect as we read it, her own—is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite."

Ayad Akhtar

"[A] remarkable experiment in historical fiction… Messud’s writing is beautiful on every page of This Strange Eventful History, but it reaches its emotional heights when she describes parental love…. Messud pulls off something rare here: Her ending turns the whole book on its head. She does this through old-school storytelling choices—by following the 'usual rules' of fiction, if you will—but it’s a master class nonetheless."

The Nation - Lily Meyer

"The multigenerational saga is as old as The Mahabharata, but contemporary authors still put their own spins on the genre. An erudite example is This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud's epic recounting of seven decades of a pied-noir family… Messud's chronicle of one family's history, the political events that shape them, and 'these strange, beautiful, appalling times' in which they live is as fine a family saga as one will read."

Shelf Awareness (starred review) - Michael Magras

"[Messud's] beguiling, deftly crafted This Strange Eventful History vaults across seven decades, from World War II to the aughts, prismed through one family's migrations through five continents as they forge a kind of nucleus, a centeredness, that they all may share… This Strange Eventful History moves like a broad river, a Nile or a Mississippi: slow and majestic, rich with the layers of its watershed. It's not a propulsive read, but one to savor, line by line, distilling its mysteries… Messud elevates the personal into the political, her themes spooling out from beneath her sensuous prose. This Strange Eventful History is assuredly her masterpiece."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Hamilton Cain

"Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family's story into a tour de force in This Strange Eventful History…all around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies…all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak."

Vogue - Taylor Antrim

"[Messud's] novels frequently feature characters who are adrift and unmoored, with complex lineages that scan as vaguely foreign wherever they are. We watch others try to discipline those unruly identities, awkwardly forcing their historical baggage into cramped boxes. In This Strange Eventful History, Messud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction, as if in defiance of this tendency. The novel brims with details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled "Everything That We Believed In," that her paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it"

The New Yorker - Jennifer Wilson

"What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours: of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludesus, how time—implacable and indecipherable—befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know."

Paul Harding

"[Messud] is a skilled prose stylist. One of her signature moves is a reliance on long, flowing, perfectly composed sentences filled with parallel constructions, perhaps an analogue to the flow of history…Messud writes beautifully about the toll of dementia and decrepitude, and how life’s challenges can suddenly widen or bridge emotional rifts…As she navigates her own complex, beclouded legacy, Messud’s generosity of spirit prevails. "Sometimes we feel alone,'" her alter ego, 7-year-old Chloe, tells herself, wise beyond her years, "but we are always more closely connected than we think."

Los Angeles Times - Julia M. Klein

"Claire Messud’s new novel, This Strange Eventful History, is both spacious and distilled, spanning seven decades and multiple continents, told from five points of view in one family, dazzling us with echoing themes, unraveling secrets, and rolling crescendos that peak in a series of finales."

Literary Hub - Jane Ciabattari

"This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another… Its effects cumulate, each scene enriching the one before it, the characters with their idiosyncratic delusions and habits and yearnings gradually acquiring the dimensions of full human beings much like the impossible and precious people we live with every day… This novel that, when summarized, seems to be about the smallest of things ends up being about everything."

Slate - Laura Miller

"[This Strange Eventful History] is slow and cumulative, skillfully building to a low but steady boil while delivering quiet, elliptical moments that nevertheless linger in the mind…[Messud's novel] is a kind of epic of inaction, and while it finely illustrates the predicament of the diasporic pieds-noirs, the novel also possesses a broader generational relevance."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Claire Messud's sweeping novel borrows from her own 'Strange Eventful History.'… A cosmopolitan, multigenerational story that, paradoxically, sticks close to home… Displacement, both political and personal, is Messud's timely subject here… The novel certainly has the stately sweep and weight of a magnum opus… You have to have lived a while to write, as Messud does here, with such intimate melancholy about how time messes with us all, displacing us from earlier versions of ourselves."

NPR - Maureen Corrigan

"Based on Messud's own family journey, this sprawling saga reaches from 1940s French Algeria to modern-day Connecticut, illuminating the toll of war, displacement and one shocking secret on successive generations of a clan buffeted by history. Evocative and eye-opening."

People Magazine - Kim Hubbard

"A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century; call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras; call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory."

Yiyun Li

"Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one…After a prologue citing her new novel’s sources in her own family history, the narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction…Each section is absorbing…As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed—no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling…How attached I had become to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them had been."

Joan Silber

"This is a novel by a writer I absolutely adore…Gorgeous, lush writing…It's this beautiful book about the wheels within wheels of life…For people looking for a really rich literary novel to get lost in…This Strange Eventful History is your book."

PBS Books - Donna Seaman

"A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become 'colonized' by family."

Joshua Cohen

★ 2024-02-03
A family rides the waves of current events and personal conflicts across three generations.

Readers of Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020) will recognize the autobiographical elements in Messud’s novel, but they are less important than the compelling way she has reinvented her family as fully fleshed fictional characters. Gaston and Lucienne Cassare, a French Algerian couple uprooted first by World War II and then by Algerian independence, embody for their son, François, and daughter, Denise, a loving companionship so total that both children will spend their lives looking for its equal. Denise, whose personal attachments rarely work out, clings to her parents’ devout Catholicism; François might have made a home in America—“its energy, its freedom, its carelessness” thrill him as an Amherst undergraduate—but his Canadian wife, Barbara, objects. Their peripatetic marriage survives her extended absences to care for her dying father in Toronto and the damage inflicted on his business career when she insists they leave Australia, but he can never get over the fact that Barbara always holds part of herself apart from him. Messud portrays the Cassares at key moments in their lives, beginning in Algeria as France falls in June 1940 and ranging across continents and seven decades: Geneva, Toronto, Toulon, Buenos Aires, suburban Connecticut, and New York—wherever their varied fortunes take them, with the author’s fictional stand-in, aspiring writer Chloe, and her sister, Loulou, entering as schoolgirls in 1970s Sydney. Messud paints compelling portraits of internal conflicts and tangled relationships, dropping along the way tantalizing references to crucial events that will be clarified later, in a rich narrative that defies summary. The novel reaches a poignant climax as the older generations age and die: Gaston and François succumb to physical ailments; Lucienne and Barbara descend into dementia. The marriage of François and Barbara, bitterly antagonistic but ultimately loyal, is perhaps the novel’s most wrenching depiction, but Messud’s gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping.

Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature’s best.

Kirkus Reviews

2024 Booker Prize, Long-listed
2025 American Book Award, Winner
2024 American Library in Paris Book Award, Short-listed
2024 Giller Prize, Long-listed

"Messud elevates the personal into the political, her themes spooling out from beneath her sensuous prose. This Strange Eventful History is assuredly her masterpiece."— Hamilton Cain Minnesota Star Tribune

"Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina that ‘happy families are all alike,’ but ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Sometimes, though, unhappiness has to do with what is universal, and this is what Messud is especially adept at conveying.… In writing this breathtaking ode—and lament—of a novel, Messud honors her ancestors by interrogating the circumstances that shaped them and the questions that plagued them."— Leigh Haber Boston Globe

"The big questions are here, about family and colonialism and grief. But the real promise of a 425-page family epic is that it will provide an emotional punch, too. On that, it delivers.… The idea that literature itself can offer absolution may be as quaint and passé these days as the Great American Novel, but Messud’s steady belief in it is intoxicating. ‘Literary language is a kind of spell,’ she writes in the introduction of her 2020 essay collection. Similar to one character’s ‘beautiful French, like his cravat, somewhat old-fashioned, but so elegant,’ her style comes to seem like a purposeful constraint. This Strange Eventful History might use some old tricks, but it’s hard not to be hypnotized."— Emma Alpern Vulture

"[T]hough Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. This Strange Eventful History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies…all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak."— Taylor Antrim Vogue

"Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one.… [T]he narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction.… Each section is absorbing.… As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed—no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling.… [H]ow attached I [became] to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them [was.]"— Joan Silber New York Times Book Review

"[Messud’s] novels frequently feature characters who are adrift and unmoored, with complex lineages that scan as vaguely foreign wherever they are. We watch others try to discipline those unruly identities, awkwardly forcing their historical baggage into cramped boxes. In This Strange Eventful History, Messud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction, as if in defiance of this tendency. The novel brims with details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled ‘Everything That We Believed In,’ that her paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it."— Jennifer Wilson The New Yorker

"Masterful."— Economist

"Magnificent and multi-layered, hearty and heartbreaking."— Ángel Gurría-Quintana Financial Times

"[Messud] is a skilled prose stylist. One of her signature moves is a reliance on long, flowing, perfectly composed sentences filled with parallel constructions, perhaps an analogue to the flow of history.… Messud writes beautifully about the toll of dementia and decrepitude, and how life’s challenges can suddenly widen or bridge emotional rifts.… As she navigates her own complex, beclouded legacy, Messud’s generosity of spirit prevails."— Julia M. Klein Los Angeles Times

"[This Strange Eventful History] is slow and cumulative, skillfully building to a low but steady boil while delivering quiet, elliptical moments that nevertheless linger in the mind.… [Messud’s novel] is a kind of epic of inaction, and while it finely illustrates the predicament of the diasporic pieds-noirs, the novel also possesses a broader generational relevance."— Sam Sacks Wall Street Journal

"This Strange Eventful History is richly textured with a diverse highlight reel of the 20th century: French and Algerian politics, Cuban night life in the early 1950s, the global impact of the aluminum and steel industries.… But perhaps the most striking aspect of this novel is how Messud conveys loneliness in its many forms. There is an apartness within each of these characters even as they are tightly knotted to each other’s lives.… [A] masterfully written novel."— Carol Iaciofano Aucoin WBUR

"This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another.… Its effects cumulate, each scene enriching the one before it, the characters with their idiosyncratic delusions and habits and yearnings gradually acquiring the dimensions of full human beings much like the impossible and precious people we live with every day.… [T]his novel that, when summarized, seems to be about the smallest of things ends up being about everything."— Laura Miller Slate

"It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose."— Alex Preston Guardian

"Claire Messud’s sweeping novel borrows from her own ‘Strange Eventful History.’ … [A] cosmopolitan, multigenerational story that, paradoxically, sticks close to home.… Displacement, both political and personal, is Messud’s timely subject here.… The novel certainly has the stately sweep and weight of a magnum opus.… [Y]ou have to have lived a while to write, as Messud does here, with such intimate melancholy about how time messes with us all, displacing us from earlier versions of ourselves."— Maureen Corrigan NPR

"Claire Messud is an author who perfectly pairs scale and intimacy in her prose. Inspired in part [by] Messud’s family history, This Strange Eventful History is an epic cross-generational story that follows a pieds-noirs family separated in the chaos of World War II and made adrift without a homeland after Algerian independence. The novel’s ingenuity and ambitious scope can’t be underestimated; This Strange Eventful History is nothing less than a literary event, sure to surprise and delight at every turn."— Michael Welch Chicago Review of Books

"With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her understanding of the human soul is profound."— BookPage, starred review

"[A] remarkable experiment in historical fiction.… Messud’s writing is beautiful on every page of This Strange Eventful History, but it reaches its emotional heights when she describes parental love.… Messud pulls off something rare here: Her ending turns the whole book on its head. She does this through old-school storytelling choices—by following the ‘usual rules’ of fiction, if you will—but it’s a master class nonetheless."— Lily Meyer Nation

"Claire Messud’s new novel, This Strange Eventful History, is both spacious and distilled, spanning seven decades and multiple continents, told from five points of view in one family, dazzling us with echoing themes, unraveling secrets, and rolling crescendos that peak in a series of finales."— Jane Ciabattari Literary Hub

"Claire Messud’s latest is a masterwork of historical fiction, spanning seven decades in the lives and dramas of one family.… It’s rich in place and perspective—an immersive, captivating story of love, politics, and entanglement."— Arianna Rebolini Bustle

"One of the giants of American fiction.… Her latest novel charts a sweeping story about a family of pieds-noirs (people of European descent born in Algeria during French occupation of the country) over the course of seven decades, where each generation influences, and arguably poisons, the next."— James Tarmy Bloomberg

"Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the 20th century…this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound."— Charley Burlock and Sofia Lodato Oprah Daily

"The always incredible Claire Messud…follows a complicated family—as if there were any other kind—across decades and around the world, as legends are made, secrets are buried, and truths come out in the most unexpected of ways. It’s a touching, skillfully crafted work that reminds us of the ongoing stories of which we’re all a part."— Emily Burack and Adam Rathe Town & Country

"Messud’s strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them."— Tope Folarin The Atlantic

"Based on Messud's own family journey, this sprawling saga reaches from 1940s French Algeria to modern-day Connecticut, illuminating the toll of war, displacement and one shocking secret on successive generations of a clan buffeted by history. Evocative and eye-opening."— Kim Hubbard People Magazine

"A novelist of exquisite artistry and insight draws on her own family history in this gorgeously realized, acutely sensitive, cosmopolitan, century-spanning, multigenerational saga…Messud captures life's wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page."— Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review

"[Claire Messud] paints compelling portraits of internal conflicts and tangled relationships, dropping along the way tantalizing references to crucial events that will be clarified later, in a rich narrative that defies summary…[her] gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping. Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature's best."— Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"[Messud] draws from her own family history for this exquisite multigenerational saga of the Cassars, a pied-noir clan exiled from Algeria by the country’s 1954–62 war of independence…In her characteristically artful prose, Messud burrows inside the hearts and minds of her key players, bringing to their struggles and self-deceptions a deep-veined empathy made even more remarkable by how close she is to the story. This is an astonishment."— Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The multigenerational saga is as old as The Mahabharata, but contemporary authors still put their own spins on the genre. An erudite example is This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud's epic recounting of seven decades of a pied-noir family… Messud's chronicle of one family's history, the political events that shape them, and 'these strange, beautiful, appalling times' in which they live is as fine a family saga as one will read."— Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness, starred review

"A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become 'colonized' by family."— Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Netanyahus

"This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment—rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family—and we suspect as we read it, her own—is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite."— Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies, a New York Times Top Ten book

"What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours: of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludesus, how time—implacable and indecipherable—befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know."— Paul Harding, author of the Booker Prize Finalist This Other Eden

"A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century; call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras; call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory."— Yiyun Li, author of the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning The Book of Goose

From the Publisher