They have always been with us, those “casual offspring,” to use Iris Murdoch’s phrase—children born to strangers who meet, have sex, and part forever. But what of the children? In her fifth novel, the accomplished Fernanda Eberstadt turns her attention to two of them and creates a work that expands our vision of people not only struggling on the poverty line in southern France but who are also struggling to make meaningful lives for themselves and those kids who came into the world under less than wonderful circumstances.

This is primarily the story of Celia Bonnet, whom her mother nicknames Ratkin as a baby, then Rat as she grows into a teenager, who is all “elbows and moods.” The story begins when Rat is a little girl trying to write a thank-you note to her father for birthday money he has never sent, money that has been fabricated by her wily and enigmatic mother, Vanessa. This father was a proper English “toff” who had come to the Pyrenees on holiday with his mother, the famous Twiggy-like model, Celia Kidd, and was attracted to Vanessa, a local girl in a nightclub.