Noah Salvaggio was a newly-retired professor in New York, planning to spend his 80th birthday in the place of his birth- Nice, France. His wife and sister were dead and he had no children. So he was free to travel. He had found, in his sister's belongings, photographs that had been taken by his mother during the war, and those photos brought up many questions about his mother's life. He knew that his mother had sent him from Nice to New York when he was four, to live with his father, while she stayed behind for two years. What happened during those two years?
Into the story comes an 11-year-old boy, whose father has died of a drug over-dose and his mother is in jail. Michael is the name of the boy and he is the grandson of Noah's sister. And he has nowhere to go because his grandmother (his mother's mother) had been caring for him, but she also died. Could you follow all that? This boy has been through much turmoil and is the only living relative of Noah- Noah's great nephew!
As unreal as that may sound, it makes for a great story of an 80-year-old man and an 11-year-old boy. And the setting to the story is Nice. Two interesting characters in the French Riviera, who have never met before. The generation gap is so obvious as these two strangers discover that they are more alike than different. In fact, they are AKIN.
Emma Donoghue was inspired to write about Nice after spending two years there with her partner and her children. She felt that she never became fluent in French, but there are many French terms in the novel, as she felt that she was writing a love-letter to the country that fascinated her so much.
As Noah searched out the story of his mother's photographs (with the help of computer-game obsessed Michael), there is an interesting look into the art world of twentieth-century France.
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