The author tells her life story...and she has a story, but it's not terribly compellingly written, the people involved remain kind of flat, and the reader perhaps is left less involved than he should be.
The narrative opens in 1935, when the middle class author, aged 15, is taken to visit her mother's family in Vienna. Inexplicably the house is empty; grandma has just taken off for Bulgaria to help in a friend's maternity hospital (didnt they have telegrams in 1935?) And so the family decamp to join her in Sofia for a little holiday...and remain there for many decades as the war and later the Iron Curtain mean the borders are firmly shut.
And then follow years of harassment as foreigners, poverty, gruelling jobs, a violent marriage, children...
All the characters remain vague and unknowable. Grandmother seems quite strong and resolved; mother appears to be either weeping or ill on every occasion she's mentioned. Even the author herself gives little away as to how she really feels as she endures endless trauma. And perhaps a few brighter moments (there must have been something good in the over 50 years in Bulgaria) might have given some contrast to the unremitting awfulness of life.
In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the author is finally able to return to Britain. ( )