The Margot Affair: A Novel

The secret daughter of a French politician and a famous actress drops the startling revelation that will shatter her family in this beguiling debut novel of intrigue and betrayal.

"There were so many of us, children of these double families who dreamed of the other side."

Margot Louve is a secret: the child of a longstanding affair between an influential French politician with presidential ambitions and a prominent stage actress. This hidden family exists in stolen moments in a small Parisian apartment on the Left Bank.

It is a house of cards that Margot--fueled by a longing to be seen and heard--decides to tumble. The summer of her seventeenth birthday, she meets the man who will set her plan in motion: a well-regarded journalist whose trust seems surprisingly easy to gain. But as Margot is drawn into an adult world she struggles to comprehend, she learns how one impulsive decision can threaten a family's love with ruin, shattering the lives of those around her in ways she could never have imagined.

Exposing the seams between private lives and public faces, The Margot Affair is a novel of deceit, desire, and transgression--and the exhilarating knife-edge upon which the danger of telling the truth outweighs the cost of keeping secrets.


Advance praise for The Margot Affair

"Subtle, beautiful, serious."--Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

"Sanaë Lemoine is an extraordinary new talent. One who makes an intergenerational story of loneliness and intrigue read like a diary and a page-turner and a masterful debut, all at once."--Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

"Powerful and affecting . . . truly exceptional."--Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors