Major/Minor

In this vivid, haunting and luminously original coming-of-age memoir set in 1980s Paris, Alba Arikha chronicles her experience of growing up in an artistic yet dysfunctional family.

Her father was the artist, Avigdor Arikha; her mother the poet, Anne Atik; her godfather, Samuel Beckett.

Their apartment, where Alba and her sister grew up, was a hub of literary and artistic achievement which still reverberates today.

Alba's tale is played out against the family memories of war and exile and the ever-present echoes of the Holocaust.