An Unfinished Portrait: A Journey Around My Mother - Tapa dura

'I found it both atmospheric and, most important, I wanted to read more' Carmen Callil 'Elegantly written and fascinating' Fay Weldon 'A poignant and beautifully written saga of migrations, which punctuates the history of our times ...' Moris Farhi 'Absolutely riveting' Amanda Hopkinson 'Frank reviews the period with a fresh eye. This is truly a new story ...' Independent 'Her voyages, spelt out in her new memoirs, have nothing to do with the Paul Theroux school of travel writing ... They became the real life characters at Rick's Cafe in Casablanca ... Camden New Journal 'A dramatic and quite gripping autobiography ... Buenos Aires Herald 'Miriam Frank's life is the epitome of twentieth-century displacement' Esra Magazine 'Miriam Frank raconta la sua vita in un libro fantastico, commovente ...' Italia Sera 'My Innocent Absence, full of lovely, tactile detail, is the story of a peripatetic life' Jewish Quarterly 'It isn't surprising that physicians often make excellent writers - they are trained to observe. Miriam Frank is one of that great line of physicians turned writers that includes Chekhov, Maugham and Keats. In Miriam's case the flawless professionalism of the surgery flows seamlessy into flawless prose that has echoes of Lawrence and Proust. This book thoroughly emerges the reader in the human condition from birth to death and back again' Edward Wilson"

The routine for Miriam Frank as a child was to flee without family, except her mother, from the moment she was born in the year the Spanish Civil War broke out. Her mother was German and her father American, both of Jewish descent. She fled to France, only to flee again from the Nazis and from there to Casablanca. Unbeknownst to Miriam until after her mother's death, her mother had kept a vivid photographic diary of her life and their flight. Frank paints a vivid and poignant portrait of a life as refugee through the colourful images of a child's eye from Collioure and Oran, to markets in Mexico's Xochilmilco, 1950s New Zealand, 1960s Israel, and modern London.