The Black Garden

It is in winter in Deauville. Yves Barray, come to take a last look at his family home before the bulldozers arrive and the demolition begins, walks along the duckboards by the bathing-huts and suddenly sees that the bleak beach is not totally deserted. There is a woman there, who rounds on Yves and accuses him of being a member of the Organization, sent to kill her.

Gradually, over the course of the next few days, the strands of her story emerge: her father who had been one of the chief doctors at Auschwitz; her mother, who used to water her garden with black dye; the notebook containing the names of prominent Nazis still alive and in hiding; David, the young man who had made love to her but also tried to strangle her; the Organization.

And then Vahl appears and Yves's involvement with Sigrid Dusz, her past and her future, takes a dramatic and tragic return.