What is the right thing to do? How could he ever have imagined he'd know the answer to a question like that?
Daniel, an expatriate Australian who has lived in Paris for more than forty years, has made a mess of his life and is trying to atone, to become the 'good man' his friend Marcelline believes him to be. But Marcelline has disappeared, the quotidian world has been tipped out of balance and Daniel makes an error of judgment that places at risk everything he values.
The novel's six-day narrative, set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the winter of 2012, expands into lifetimes, histories, as interconnecting stories weave through Daniel's. Stories of abandonment and fractured families, rape and coercion, addiction, ambition, loss and grief, are told in moments and set within the context of war and occupation, the revolutionary sixties, riots in a Catalan town in the south of France, a grassroots movement to make visible the invisible homeless. The personal stitched into, and inseparable from, the political.
And throughout, the constant of footsteps and pawpatter as Daniel and his old dog walk the streets of one of the most idealised and romanticised cities on earth.
