Serge Battour is the son of a French viscount and a Romani prostitute, and despite his kind nature and academic talent, is shunned by his family and his peers due to the color of his skin. He begins to attend...

The setting: A boys' boarding school in Germany, sometime in the mid-20th century. One winter day, fourteen-year-old Thomas Werner falls from a lonely pedestrian overpass to his death, immediately after mailing...