I felt always that the crumbling paper must hold something that was more like speaking flesh and blood . . . that somewhere amid these shreds . . . I would learn something of this family lost to silence; something about a house that was quickly abandoned and a family divided, and then all gates shut on the past.

A young Australian man arrives in riot-ravaged Paris, armed with an old manuscript written in French and an obsessive desire to piece together the fragments of a mystery that has haunted him since childhood. His journey takes him back and forth in time, over the ruins of desert and city, and through the veils and mirages of history and memory. From Paris to the desolate, windswept Australian desert to the appalling dank prisons of 19th-century New Caledonia, this is an epic story of a search for truth, spanning continents and generations.