"1940 in the Spanish border city of Portbou. As the shadow of fascism lengthens over Europe, three mysterious travellers arrive in town. They carry themselves with the casual ease of Parisian intellectuals, but in reality this trio of two men and a woman are starving, desperate and exhausted from dodging bullets and German forces to cross illegally through the Pyrenees. Their goal is to escape notice in Spain long enough to book transit to Portugal, and then to the USA. Their story, told over a period of 48 absorbing and tense hours, is narrated by one of the men, a writer who gradually accepts that the end is near. In a voice beautifully urbane and utterly despairing, he calmly considers what he must do as the Gestapo close in. He also weighs, his mind and senses sharp with hunger and loss, what any one life means--and as he does so, his attention is caught by a girl named Pia, dancing in the waves on the beach below his window. To her, he addresses all that he thinks and feels during these final heightened hours. Decades later, in the 1970s, a woman named Pia seeks solitude on a small island in the Atlantic, where she works as the chef at the local inn while coming to terms with her chaotic childhood as the daughter of a war reporter. As Pia's story opens, a raging storm engulfs the island and we learn that a boat carrying refugees is floundering offshore. When Pia and her fellow islanders rush to help, past and present calamities collide. By turns elegiac and heart-pounding, The Certainties is an intricate and absorbing novel about the thread that connects ideas and actions, past and present. It is riveting in its brilliant contemplative moments, and in its white-knuckle eruptions of violence. A gorgeous, timely meditation on the plight of those who seek refuge, past and present, here and everywhere."-- Provided by publisher.