Winner of the Swiss Prix Dentan, Jean-Michel Olivier's novel is a haunting excavation of the secrets we inherit in our DNA - the hidden deeds of ancestors we glimpse only through a distant cousin's confession or a box of old photographs. Set in Trieste as the city passes from Austrian to Italian hands after the First World War, it moves among cameo appearances by James and Nora Joyce, Ezra Pound and Vladimir Nabokov.