Based on the author's own family history and already a colossal best-seller in Europe, UK readers are now being let in on the story of a family haunted by the secrets of their past: an illicit love affair, a lost child, and a devastating betrayal dating back to the Second World War. This work is suitable for readers of Nemirovsky's Suite francaise, Magda Szabo's The Door, Schlink's The Reader, Pierre Peju's The Girl from the Chartreuse, Sandor Marai's Embers & fans of the film Hidden. The day after I turned fifteen, I finally discovered what I'd always known... Growing up in post-war Paris the sickly only child of glamorous, athletic parents, the narrator invents for himself a make-believe brother - older, stronger, and more brilliant than he can ever be. It is only when the boy begins talking to an old family friend that he comes to realise that his imaginary sibling had a real predecessor: a half-brother whose death in the concentration camps is part of a buried family secret that he was intended never to unearth.