THE BOY FROM BOSKOVICE

What makes a good man bad? This is the extraordinary story of the authors father, a Holocaust survivor who left a trail of pain and secrets in his wake

The compelling story of a daughters quest to find out the disturbing truth of who her father really was Sarah Helm, author of If This is a Woman

Vicky Unwin had always known her father – an erstwhile intelligence officer and respected United Nations diplomat – was Czech, but it was not until a stranger turned up on her doorstep that she discovered he was also Jewish.

So began a quest to discover the truth about his past – one that perhaps would help answer the niggling doubts she had always had about her perfect father. Finally persuading him to allow her to open a closely guarded cache of family books and papers, Vicky discovered the identity of her grandfather: the tormented author and diplomat Hermann Ungar, hugely controversial in both life and in death, who was a protégé and possible lover of Thomas Mann, and a friend of Berthold Brecht and Stefan Zweig. How much of her fathers child was Vicky – and how much of his fathers child was he?

As she works to uncover deeply buried family secrets, she finds herself slowly unpicking the lingering power of survivors guilt on the generations that followed the Holocaust, and learns, via a deathbed confession, that she has a half-sister.

Together, the sisters attempt to come to terms with what made their father the deeply flawed, complex, yet charismatic man he has always been, journeying together through grief and heartache towards forgiveness.