A French politician’s secret child re-evaluates her life

The Margot Affair. By Sanaë Lemoine.Hogarth; 336 pages; $27. Sceptre; £16.99. 

WHEN THE existence of François Mitterrand’s secret child was revealed by Paris Match in 1994, many insiders in France shrugged. “Everyone knew,” people said of the president’s mistress and of Mazarine, his daughter. Discretion over adultery is widely considered a French speciality—yet such deception has its costs. In a new novel about a politician’s secret family, it taints every aspect of life.

Sanaë Lemoine was just a girl when “L’affaire Mazarine” burst into the headlines. Out of the contradictions of this quintessentially French arrangement she has spun “The Margot Affair”, an unusual and accomplished first novel. With a quick wink to the real-life case, she dives deep into the intense, duplicitous relationships at the heart of such a ménage.

Seventeen-year-old Margot is the result of an illicit liaison between Anouk, a glamorous actress, and the married minister of culture. She adores her mainly absent father, fights with her complicated, remote mother and suffers from a “confused feeling of unhappiness”. On the cusp of adulthood she suddenly sees that, relegated to the shadows as they are, she and her mother are “on the wrong side of Father’s double life”, a realisation...