AN AUTHORITATIVE WORK OF HISTORY, A BRILLIANT PIECE OF RESEARCH WITH ALL THE QUALITY OF THE BEST MEMOIRS

In the 1960s, Carmen Callil visited a psychiatrist called Anne Darquier; they forged a close bond, tragically broken when Anne committed suicide. Years later, by chance, Carmen discovered that Anne's father was the French war criminal, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix.

Louis Darquier was a French Nazi a collaborator and a con man - appropriating the aristocratic 'de Pellepoix' and styling himself 'Baron'. He married a failed Australian actress, Myrtle Jones, and Anne, their only child, was abandoned to a nurse at birth. She was raised, in poverty, in Oxfordshire.

Their extraordinary story - and that of Louis Darquier's ascent to power before and during the Second World War is the keyhole into a revelatory account of the terrible acts of the Vichy government during the war years. Louis Darquier - always broke, always desperate for attention, social cachet, women and drink - became the longest serving Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the Vichy government. Most of the over seventy thousand French Jews who died in Auschwitz were sent to death during his tenure. He was never brought to justice.

Vivid, haunting, masterly, BAD FAITH is an absorbing study of small lives and great events, interweaving comedy and tragedy in a tour de force of memory, accountability - and acknowledgement.

'A hugely accomplished and confident book... Along with Todorov's A French Tragedy, it is probably the most interesting book I've read on Vichy...'
Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich