Esmond and Ilia
Book description
By one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical.
Marina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during…
Why read it?
1 author picked Esmond and Ilia as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Written in elegant prose and with vivid visual detail, this book uncovers an exotic lost world—lost both to the author, with the death of her parents, and to all of us, with the march of history.
This is the world of a British bookshop owner and his Italian-born wife, in Cairo after World War II, in the years leading up to the 1952 revolution that marked the awakening of independent feeling in Egypt. The city Warner uncovers, on the brink of the revolution and after a devastating war, is her childhood paradise, and she is not afraid to portray it…
From Andreea's list on memoirs about crossing cultures to find yourself.
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