The novel’s most important and overt theme concerns the fraught politics of colonial (and post-colonial) identity. Wherever they live, the Cassar family members experience the disorienting feelings of displacement and rootlessness, and their search for belonging characterizes both the family and the history of the pieds-noirs as a cultural group. The author pays particular attention to how cultural displacement and rootlessness create identity confusion and result in a never-ending search for belonging and home, making it difficult to hold on to familial and cultural traditions.

The first characters to struggle with identity as a result of having been born French Algerian and having to flee Algeria are Gaston and Lucienne. More than their children, they feel deeply connected to France through values, history, beliefs, and religion but also identify distinctly as French Algerian because they were born and raised in North Africa. Of his parents, the young François observes:

Maman and Papa had always talked about how much they loved Algiers, how much a part of them it was, how he and Denise would love it too, the most beautiful city on earth, its shining white buildings rising in a crescent around the glittering Mediterranean. But when they got there, he’d hardly noticed what it looked like, just that it was very hot (10).