Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised--the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged, backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves--until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past, is a haunting story of friendship, art, exploitation, and memory by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.