This novella revolves around two young boys, the narrator and his younger brother, who come to live with a family friend in a Paris suburb after their mother, an actress, “had gone on the road for a play.”

“Suspended Sentences” is a childhood memoir in which young Patoche is palmed off by his parents onto a surrogate family of loveable freaks in a town outside Paris. Life there is immeasurably enlivened by the strange “friends of the family” who swing by in expensive American cars for clandestine meetings, or to whisk them all off for suspicious jaunts around Paris.