A01=Lulah Ellender
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Author_Lulah Ellender
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grandmother's story
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Product details
- ISBN 9781783783854
- Weight: 282g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 07 Mar 2019
- Publisher: Granta Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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'Go to your "books to read" list and place Elisabeth's Lists right at the top' Damian Barr
The vivacious and moving true story of a lost era and a lost grandmother, pieced together from an inherited book of handwritten lists
Many years after the death of her grandmother, Lulah Ellender inherited a curious object - a book of handwritten lists.
On the face of it, Elisabeth's lists seemed rather ordinary - shopping lists, items to be packed for a foreign trip, a tally of the eggs laid by her hens. But from these everyday fragments, Lulah began to weave together the extraordinary life of the grandmother she never knew - a life lived in the most rarefied and glamorous of circles, from Elisabeth's early years as an ambassador's daughter in 1930s China, to her marriage to a British diplomat and postings in Madrid under Franco's regime, post-war Beirut, Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
But it was also a life of stark contrasts - between the opulent excess of embassy banquets and the deprivations of wartime rationing in England, between the unfailing charm she displayed in public and the dark depressions that blanketed her in private, between her great appetite for life and her sudden, early death.
As Lulah learns that she is losing her own mother, she finds herself turning to her grandmother's life, and to her much-travelled book of lists, in search of meaning and solace.
Elisabeth's Lists is both a vivid memoir and a moving study of the familial threads that binds us, even beyond death.
'This is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on life and death' Guardian
Lulah Ellender's writing has appeared in the Guardian, YOU magazine, EasyLiving and Green Parent, among others. She lives in Lewes, East Sussex, with her husband and four children. This is her first book.
