From internationally bestselling author Muriel Barbery comes a wise, gently captivating novel that transports readers to a snowbound château in the French countryside, where guests gathered after a funeral confront the long-buried ghosts of their pasts.

The writer Thomas Helder has died in the prime of his life. Once the funeral is over, his loved ones gather at his mother's château in the Aveyron countryside, its walls bathed in the fading light as snow falls softly outside.

At the heart of the gathering is Margaux, a renowned French architect and one of Thomas's dearest friends. She had disappeared from their lives, seemingly for good. But Thomas has left her a letter.

Settled into an armchair with a glass of whisky, Margaux talks late into the night with Thomas's older brother, Jorg, and the other guests. As they revisit their final moments with Thomas, distant memories return, carrying them back into their shared past between the windswept Aubrac region and the canals of Amsterdam, where they grew up, loved one another and sometimes lied to each other.

Set over the course of a winter evening, Thomas Helder is a poignant, delicate meditation on estrangement and the afterlife of intimacy from bestselling author Muriel Barbery.