A grown man sits with a young child named Melody, turning back the pages of memory to tell the story of his life. Jacques De Arthenay recalls his childhood in a household divided between warmth and severity: his mother Marie, whose enchanting music and tender presence shaped his soul, and his father Jacques, a man of formidable temper and unspoken grief. Through Jacques's eyes, we witness the delicate machinery of a late 19th-century family, where love exists alongside emotional tyranny, and where a boy's reverence for his mother becomes both his salvation and his greatest sorrow. The novel unfolds in luminous flashbacks, each memory threaded with the melodies Marie sang, the sanctuary she created, and the complex man her son would become. This is a quiet meditation on inheritance, on the songs we carry forward, and on the ways childhood shapes every choice we make as adults. Richards writes with tender precision about the profound ordinary: a mother's hand on a child's hair, the weight of a father's silence, the lasting echo of a lullaby.
