Set in the blue-collar world of a small port town in Northern France at the height of the Algerian War, this is the story of little eight-year old Fred, or Fred Hamster as he is known because of his puffy cheeks. Fred is the butcher’s son. He’s a sensitive child who faints at the sight of blood and cannot live up to his parents’ expectations. His best friend is a beautiful, exotic and lonely young Algerian woman named Leila, who lives alone on a barge moored down by the docks. Her story, collected in a notebook that she leaves him at the end of the book, is interwoven with Fred’s first-person child’s eye view of the world. Leila fled Algeria, and an arranged marriage by eloping with a young Frenchman. Once in France, their marriage fell apart, leaving Leila living alone on the barge, but for the occasional brutal abuse of her ex-husband, now a drunken loaf. Fred takes it upon himself to protect Leila, but the tension and racial incidents only increase as the war in Algeria turns bad for the French colonists. In the end Leila must leave the only home she has, and her only friend, to save him.