The Suitcase

Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father’s papers. ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again’, warned her mother. 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 seemed to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she found herself with the dilemma of two competing urges – wanting to know what’s in the suitcase, and wanting not to know. So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father’s and his family’s past.