A terrible event took place during the childhood of the great-grandmother and the consequences will spread throughout generations. It is a book about the impact of political and family events, about the way in which memories are transmitted, about how History influences private stories... This is how the award-winning French-Canadian writer Nancy Huston defines this novel, which in addition to the Femina 2006 was a huge success in France. Through the stories of four children, from the present to the past, the reader accesses the personal memories that interweave the family history until culminating in the discovery of a secret that has determined the lives of all of them. The novel opens in California in 2004, with the brilliant and pampered Sol; continues in 1982 with his father Randall, who divides his childhood between New York and Haifa; continues with her grandmother Sadie from the Toronto of the sixties and culminates with great-grandmother Erra from her home in Munich in 1944. A birthmark, a congenital sign that unites the four generations, will be the key to unveil this terrible mystery that has irremediably conditioned their lives.