The Book

Sarah is eight years old the first time she hears those six words. A hand gripping hers too tightly, a street in December, a voice that cuts. Six words. Nobody notices them. They will never leave her.

Her mother inherited them from her own, who had them from further back still. But behind those six words there is something else. Someone whose name is never spoken. A man, a year, 1934, and a silence that nobody, in four generations, has dared to break.

From La Chaux-de-Fonds to a bench facing Lake Geneva, 289 francs is the story of that sentence. Of those who carried it, of the women, the men, the secrets thought to be buried. And of the courage it takes, one day, to decide that it stops here.

You have a sentence too. You carry it. And you already know where it comes from - or you're going to want to find out.

The novel reads in two passes. First, to feel that sentence, and perhaps recognise yourself in Sarah, or in one of those who cross her life. Then, in "Reading between the lines", each scene reveals what grounds it: how the Swiss pension system really works, what inflation quietly eats away, why an emergency fund changes everything else. Enough to reread the novel, and perhaps your own story, with different eyes.