In This Dark House: A Memoir - Hardcover

Kehoe, Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670866415 ISBN 13: 9780670866410

Publisher: Viking, 1996

Synopsis

This is a true story of childhood, written by the youngest daughter of Berthold Lubetkin, an architect who came to prominence in Britain in the 1930s as one of the first modernists. He abruptly dropped out of London society just before the war and moved with his wife to the tiny village of upper Killington in the Severn Valley where he raised a family in a house they named "World's End". Here, he was determined to keep them in utter isolation, in their own world where his word was law. A tryant and a bully, he dominated his wife and family absolutely and it was not until after his death that his daughter came to know the precise nature of the devils which drove him on. Lubetkin's family had died at Auschwitz, unacknowledged by a son who had never tried to save them and who had never forgiven himself. This is a poignant book about an almost indescribably painful childhood, how the author survived it and how she came to understand.

About this title

Review:

*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD*

"A marvelously lucid account of a savage childhood, and of the family conspiracy that engendered it."
--Anita Brookner

"Well constructed and beautifully written, [with] an emotional honesty which generates its own kind of lasting truth."
--The Times Literary Supplement

"An astonishing, impossible-to-put-down page-turner of a book! Kehoe's tale will elicit glimmers of recognition in anyone who has wondered how to go about freeing oneself from the world which begins at home."
--Daphne Merkin, author of Dreaming of Hitler

"At once a memoir and a reminder of how the global and the intensely personal inextricable intertwine. An awesome an exhilarating tale."
--Carolyn See, author of The Handyman

"Eloquent . . . As in the best fiction, the story ultimately makes a scramble of our easy moralizing. This memoir . . . transcends its own form, becoming a testament to the ways in which historical ills sicken the individual soul."
--Newsday

About the Author:

LOUISE KEHOE is a writer and garden designer who lives in New Hampshire. In This Dark House won the National Jewish Book Award in 1995 and, in the United Kingdom, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in 1997.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0670866415
• ISBN 13: 9780670866410
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240