Secret by Philippe Grimbert, trans. Polly McLean

"Although an only child, for many years I had a brother." So begins this spare, remarkable novel, which reads as easily as a children's tale, yet packs a grown-up punch. Set in the aftermath of the Nazi Occupation of France, when shame and fear polluted many a life and skeletons lay lightly buried under the post-war blooms, Secret tells the troubled story of a sickly boy who grows into an awareness of what he has always somehow known and yet was never told.

Although there is nothing Jewish in his home life and his fit parents are not proverbially bookish, being far more interested in diving and gymnastics, he is Jewish. The prized, only child once had a brother, akin to the imaginary one he tussles with nightly in his bed. Most disturbing of all, his idealised parents' very desire for each other may have been implicated in the death of near ones in the concentration camps.

The subtlety of Secret is that the content of the revelations are less crucial to the hero's life than the manner in which secrets are lived, the lies they engender, the ways in which they provoke a fundamental uncertainty. The unspoken, as Grimbert evokes it, is a key actor in a child's life. Parental pasts, all the more so when covered up, haunt and distort the life of even the most beloved offspring. This is how wartime persecutors continue to triumph even after they have been defeated.

Grimbert's child bears the same name as his author. This is his story, too. At every turn we ask: did the author, like his hero, discover his Jewishness in the late Sixties after a school screening about the camps resulted in fisticuffs after an anti-Semitic slur? Shunted into the position of detectives, we are forced to wonder whether we are in the realm of biography or fiction. This, too, is part of the book's intelligence. Key to growing up, as well as reading, Grimbert implies, is the weighing up of different kinds of truths.

It is somehow fitting that both the real and the imagined adult Grimberts practise as psychoanalysts, experts in secrets and their unconscious life. Polly McLean's elegiac and vivid rendering into English captures that play of tenses which makes memory both past and present, although already containing its future - just as Philippe can discover what he has always known.