Discretion

- Blurb -

Yamina Taleb is approaching her seventieth birthday. Not that she' s sure exactly when to celebrate it, since her Algerian identity papers state a different date of birth to her French ones. These days, Yamina strives for a quiet life and to be, at best, invisible. The closest she gets to drama is flashing her pensioner' s bus pass in the style of police officers she' s seen on television or scooping ' revolutionary' bargains in the form of plastic kitchenware gadgets. But Yamina' s children feel differently. They are made to feel out of place in Paris, and it hurts. Then, for the first time in forty years, the whole family take a holiday from the city - not a return trip to the motherland, but a holiday in France. In the privacy of their villa-with-pool rental, it becomes clear to them all: there is no ' going back' . Alternating fragments from Yamina' s Algerian past with those of her Paris present, Discretion spans the history of colonial conflict from the Second World War to the present day. A tribute to mothers everywhere, it is also the story of a modern French family feeling their way through the puzzle of their history - and finding one another as they go along.