As a child Peter Debauer becomes fascinated by a story he discovers in a volume of fiction edited by his Swiss grandparents. He initially reads only part of the tale, which has been torn from the bound proofs. He becomes obsessed with this tale of a soldier who comes home to find what? Debauer doesn't discover until years later, when he finds the missing pages of the story The crux of the narrative is mystery - and the attempt to unveil identity. Peter knows very little about his father, but amongst all his reading as a child and latterly, as an editor himself, he stumbles across a text written by an esteemed American academic, who must be his father. Peter's mother has led him to believe his father was dead, but why?
