The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border

Description

A captivating family history and a meditation on memory, borders and loss from the prizewinning historian and writer. *Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022* 'This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday Times If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again. Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. So begins a captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stoner Saunders decides to unpick her family's past.

Frances Stonor Saunders is a writer, broadcaster and documentary-maker. She writes for the London Review of Books and Guardian, and is the former Arts Editor of the New Statesman. Her first book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, has been translated into twenty languages, and was awarded the Royal Historical Society's William Gladstone Memorial Prize. She is also the author of Hawkwood and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.

Absolutely compelling... It's an extraordinary achievement. -- Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes Intimate, affecting, elegiac - a remarkable exploration in the hands of a special writer. -- Philippe Sands, author of East West Street Frances Stonor Saunders is one of those writers you read no matter what she writes. She is that good... this is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind... [The Suitcase] will haunt you. -- James McConnachie * Sunday Times * [An] intimate and enquiring family history... Sympathetic, erudite, mournful -- Matthew Janney * Financial Times * Stonor Saunders...has a magpie-eye for the telling detail... a vivid turn of phrase. -- Robbie Millen * The Times *