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Frances Stonor Saunders

Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border

Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border

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Frances Stonor Saunders was given an old suitcase filled with her father's papers, which she opened ten years ago. This exploration of history, memory, and geography is driven by the ache for completion and is about the silences and stories that protect us and the borders we construct to fortify our sense of who we are. It is a beautifully written, beautifully composed investigation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 03 June 2021
Publisher: Vintage Publishing


Frances Stonor Saunders is a writer whose work you simply must read, regardless of the subject matter. She is that talented...
This is family history at its finest, with words that dance off the page and flutter in the mind.
Sunday Times

Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was given an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her mother warned her: "If you open that suitcase, you'll never close it again." Her father's life had been a study of borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey, then Egypt, and finally to Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she finds herself facing a dilemma: she wants to know what's in the suitcase, but she doesn't want to know.

So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory, and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unravels her father's and his family's past. Is it possible to bring her father back, to summon once more someone who was distant and elusive when alive? The past is always the history of loss, of black holes, of things gone missing. Life is a long forgetting, even as we live it.

The Suitcase is an extraordinary, heroic effort of retrieval, driven by the ache for completion. It is about the silences and stories that protect us, and the borders we construct, both literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are.

A beautifully written, beautifully composed investigation, TLS Books of the Year 2021.

Weight: 458g
Dimension: 145 x 224 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787330542

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