num_pages: 119
description: The narrator is a ten year old boy who lives with his grandparents in a Flemish village. His grandmother guards the family dead with fierce determination arranging and re-arranging their photographs in a special cabinet talking to them and arguing with them. The cabinet is an extension of heaven with its own purgatory and hell: their place in his grandmother's favour is marked by their proximity to a statue of the Blessed Virgin. But one image is always next to the Virgin: Marcel who died young far away and for whom there is no grave. How did he die? His laughing eyes staring out from a face already obliterated by the sun give nothing away. Only when the boy uncovers letters that hint at a hidden past does he decide to learn who Marcel was and why the circumstances of his death remain so painful.
language: English
title: Marcel
publisher: Vintage