Stepan, a Russian aristocrat by birth and a lorry driver by trade, has long believed his only child to be dead. When he discovers that his 15-year-old daughter is still alive in a Swiss hospital he is determined to take her home. Her physical and mental deformities may prevent her from any but the most basic responses but to him she is more than a child possessed -- she is a gift from God, and from Helene, his beautiful actress wife from whom he has long been separated.A Child Possessed is a love story, but one that is based on a different kind of love from that usually explored in fiction. Set against two different backdrops, the bustle of crowded Marseilles and the peace of sun-steeped Provence, the contrast emphasizes the humor and sadness, the light and the dark which brings the novel to its moving and perhaps inevitable denouement.