As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realize how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew.This is the moving, rarely told story, of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of migration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community. Appignanesi brilliantly explores the workings of personal and public memory, the legacies of internalized racism and the myths families create in order to make life bearable.

Lisa Appignanesi was born in Poland and grew up in Canada and France. A prize-winning novelist and writer, she is a former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She is the author (with John Forrester) of the classic study Freud's Women, the Charles Taylor Prize shortlisted Losing the Dead, and the award-winning Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors. Lisa lives in London, England.

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