In a chaotic and violent world, Makine’s characters construct their private histories and mythologies, their inner sanctuaries of self, woven out of intense moments of personal memory, and sometimes from iconic inherited recollections. Makine, like his fellow émigré Conrad, is drawn to the framing device of the nameless narrator — a window for the outsider to look in. A stranger listens — in a place of waiting, such as a railway station or a graveyard — to the history of another, piecing together his or her life from glimpses of “the mysterious consonance of eternal moments”.

The imagined lives constructed in these novels seem as delicate and elaborate as the domed nest of a long-tailed tit, woven out of spider’s web to withstand the weather. Yet the wonderful architectural complexity of the nest is apparently effected using a relatively limited repertoire of movements. As the scientist Niko Tinbergen writes, “The most amazing thing about it is, in my opinion, the fact that so few, so simple, so rigid movements together lead to the construction of so superb a result.”

The same, perhaps, is true of Makine’s novels. Readers will quickly recognise almost obsessively recurrent themes, images and tropes. In several novels, there is the figure of the silvery-haired elderly woman — a rescuer, a foreigner (who usually teaches a boy French). Her name may be Charlotte, corrupted in Russian to Shura, and then Sasha, and then re-constructed as Alexandra. She appears in the three novels that can be loosely grouped together as a trilogy, though in a shifting relationship to the boy she rescues, so that she can never quite be said to be the same woman. Yet her attributes are also distributed among other women in other novels, such as Tanya in A Hero’s Daughter, who is also a nurse with a maimed right hand and also saves a nearly dead soldier by holding a mirror to his lips.