In 2015, on the night following a terrorist massacring eighty-three tourists on the beach at Sousse, a woman sits facing the sea and writes a complicated love letter to her homeland, Tunisia, which she feels she must leave forever. She also writes of her personal tragedies-the deaths of her father, a quiet man, and of another lifelong friend, who just weeks ago died at sea, having forsaken the writing that had given his life meaning.

Part of a trilogy on the history of Tunisia's Jewish community, Fellous's story nods to Proust and encompasses a multitude of colorful portraits, sweeping readers onto a lyrical journey from Tunisia to Paris to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, full of the voices of loved ones now silent.