The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War is Nossiter's intensely personal confrontation with the effects of this awakening to the dark side of the French record in the war. For three years he lived and traveled in France, listening to people talk about the war -- mapping their stories, silences, evasions, and even lies. In Bordeaux, Nossiter follows the trial of Maurice Papon, the retired French official accused a half-century later of orchestrating the deportation of Jews; he settles in Vichy, the seat of France's wartime government and the dark heart of its compromises with the Nazis; and in Tulle he listens for the echoes of a single afternoon when the Germans carried out a terrible massacre.

Illuminating the many ways in which painful memories of the past leave their mark on the present, Nossiter reveals deep truths about how we remember and why we forget. The result is a searching and beautifully written narrative of how the French today live their lives in the shadow of the war and its crimes.