PLEASE NOTE: This event has been postponed. Keep an eye on The Reading List for the new event date and time.  

Jonathan Ball, Love Books and The Reading List invite you to the launch of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family by Hadley Freeman.

Freeman will be in conversation with Terry Shakinovsky.

The launch will be streamed live on The Reading List’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Event details

Date: Tuesday 13 October 2020
Time: 18:00 SAST
Venue: The Reading List’s Facebook page and YouTube channel
Facebook event

About the book

After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. Sala Glass was a European expat in America – defiantly clinging to her French influences, famously reserved, fashionable to the end – yet to Hadley much of her life remained a mystery. Sala’s experience of surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history was never spoken about.

When Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother’s treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz.

By piecing together letters, photos and an unpublished memoir, Hadley brings to life the full story of the Glass siblings for the first time: Alex’s past as a fashion couturier and friend of Dior and Chagall; trusting and brave Jacques, a fierce patriot for his adopted country; and the brilliant Henri who hid in occupied France – each of them made extraordinary bids for survival during the Second World War. And alongside her great-uncles’ extraordinary acts of courage in Vichy France, Hadley discovers her grandmother’s equally heroic but more private form of female self-sacrifice.

A moving memoir following the Glass siblings throughout the course of the twentieth-century as they each make their own bid for survival, House of Glass explores assimilation, identity and home – issues that are deeply relevant today.

Categories International Non-fiction

Tags Book events Book launches Hadley Freeman House of Glass Jonathan Ball Publishers Love Books Terry Shakinovsky Virtual book events Virtual book launches