What makes a good man bad? This is the extraordinary story of the author's father, a Holocaust survivor who left a trail of pain and secrets in his wake
'The compelling story of a daughter's quest to find out the disturbing truth of who her father really was' Sarah Helm, author of If This is a Woman
Vicky Unwin had always known her father - an erstwhile intelligence officer and respected United Nations diplomat - was Czech, but it was not until a stranger turned up on her doorstep that she discovered he was also Jewish.
So began a quest to discover the truth about his past - one that perhaps would help answer the niggling doubts she had always had about her 'perfect' father. Finally persuading him to allow her to open a closely guarded cache of family books and papers, Vicky discovered the identity of her grandfather: the tormented author and diplomat Hermann Ungar, hugely controversial in both life and in death, who was a protégé and possible lover of Thomas Mann, and a friend of Berthold Brecht and Stefan Zweig. How much of her father's child was Vicky - and how much of his father's child was he?
As she works to uncover deeply buried family secrets, she finds herself slowly unpicking the lingering power of 'survivors' guilt' on the generations that followed the Holocaust, and learns, via a deathbed confession, that she has a half-sister.
Together, the sisters attempt to come to terms with what made their father the deeply flawed, complex, yet charismatic man he has always been, journeying together through grief and heartache towards forgiveness.
Autorentext
Vicky Unwin has had a long career, centred round her African roots, in both book and newspaper publishing. Her first book Love and War in The WRNS, a collection of her mother's letters home during the Second World War, was published in June 2015. Intrigued by her father's past, she started to research her family's long and complicated history. Following her father's death she returned to the family secrets. The Boy from Boskovice tells that story.
She lives in London and, when she's not gardening or travelling, is a Trustee of Farm Africa - following her life-long passion for Africa; and Chair of Transform Drug Policy Foundation, an organisation whose aim is to legally regulate and decriminalise drugs, a mission she adopted after the death of her daughter Louise from a ketamine overdose in 2011. @vickyunwin