ISBN: 9780099448662

Synopsis Marcel is a sympathetic, sometimes hilarious exploration of family secrets, and of the burden of guilt borne by so many in post-war Europe. The narrator is a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandparents in a Flemish village. His grandmother guards the family dead with fierce determination, arranging and rearranging their photographs in a special cabinet, talking to them and arguing with them. The cabinet is an extension of heaven, with its own purgatory and hell: their place in his grandmother’s favour is marked by their proximity to a statue of the Blessed virgin. But one image is always next to the Virgin: Marcel, who died young, far away, and for whom there is no grave. How did he die? His laughing eyes, staring out from a face already half obliterated by the sun, give nothing away.
Only when the boy comes upon letters that hint at a hidden past, does he decide to learn who Marcel was, and why the circumstances of his death remain so painful.