Frances Stonor Saunders

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.

[An] intimate and enquiring family history... Sympathetic, erudite, mournful

Stonor Saunders...has a magpie-eye for the telling detail... [and] a vivid turn of phrase.

Frances Stonor Saunders vividly captures the horror and absurdity of life in the theatre of conflict, and human versatility... The Suitcase is...a study in the meaningful artifice of human experience.

Excellent... The Suitcase intrigues and fascinates and causes the reader to reflect on the uneven fates of those families that survived the Holocaust and those that did not.

A beautifully written, beautifully composed investigation into her [Saunders's] father's origins, and also the idea of a border. It still haunts me.

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Six Attempts to Cross a Border

*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

Praise for The Suitcase

Absolutely compelling... It's an extraordinary achievement.

Intimate, affecting, elegiac - a remarkable exploration in the hands of a special writer.