When Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman chanced on a shoebox filled with her French grandmother’s treasured belongings, she began the unravelling of a fascinating family story that had remained hidden for decades: that of her grandmother Sala and her three brothers’ lives in France and beyond, their struggle for survival during the Second World War and their thrilling associations with the likes of Picasso, Chagall and Dior.

 

Immensely moving, her family memoir House of Glass delves not only into the past, but into those connections that lie just beneath the surface of everyday life.