This Strange Eventful History

This Strange Eventful History (2024) is a novel by American author Claire Messud. Loosely based on her own family’s history, it chronicles the experiences of the Cassars, a French Algerian family, as they’re displaced by World War II and the successful fight for Algerian independence. Various family members settle in France, Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the US, feeling out of place in each location and struggling to come to terms with the complexity of French Algerian identity after France’s colonial empire collapses. The novel explores themes related to displacement and belonging, the interplay between historical events and individual lives, and colonialism’s fraught legacy. The novel’s title derives from a key soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that, like the novel, examines individual identity within the broader contexts of lifespan and history.

Messud is known for character-driven narratives featuring multiple settings and strong female figures, and she often explores how identity and relationships evolve and how historical events impact individuals, families, and communities. Like This Strange Eventful History, Messud’s novel The Last Life (1999) tells the story of the pieds-noirs, an ethnically French community that lived in Algeria during its colonial occupation; it’s likewise a multigenerational saga focusing on a French Algerian family during the 20th century.