Emotional arithmetic

Melanie Winters is a middle-aged woman whose life is full of contradictions. She is a mother and a lover, eccentric and brave, and impossible to predict. Beneath her ordinary routines lies a childhood trauma. As a girl she was held at Drancy, the transit camp in Paris that fed prisoners to Auschwitz, and it was there that she came to understand her parents would not come back.

During the two years that followed, Melanie survived with the help of two people. Christopher Lewis, an English boy, became her friend, and Jakob Bronski, an older man, protected her. Decades later, Melanie takes in Bronski, now elderly, a Russian dissident who spent time in a Soviet labour camp. Christopher has since become a novelist, and he too returns to her life.

As the two men draw closer to her, the past begins to unsettle Melanie's fragile mental state. She has to face the old demons once more and weigh guilt against love, good against evil, and duty against desire.