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The Suitcase
  • Published: 3 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473552722
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

The Suitcase

Six Attempts to Cross a Border

Formats & editions
EBook
3 June 2021
Paperback
2 July 2022
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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.
  • Published: 3 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473552722
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
Categories:

Praise for The Suitcase

A completely fascinating and disturbing story written with consummate elegance and unsettling power. A forgotten corner of twentieth-century history brilliantly revealed to us.

William Boyd, (THE WOMAN WHO SHOT MUSSOLINI)

A hammer-blow of a book... Her research is formidable, her tone tenacious, her eye for a titbit vivid, her sense of humour lively.

Jeremy Isaacs, Spectator (WHO PAID THE PIPER?)

Addictively readable...and compellingly intelligent, [Hawkwood] offers a mirror not only for the 14th century but for our own disturbing times.

Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times (HAWKWOOD)

Frances Stonor Saunders has almost single-handedly started off a branch of sub-history... An extraordinarily good book, and I recommend it to anyone.

Ian McEwan, BBC Radio 4 (WHO PAID THE PIPER?)

Simply the most vivid account of the late medieval world I have ever read.

Terry Jones, Monty Python and author of Chaucer's Knight, (HAWKWOOD)