In this memoir, journalist Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, troubled father she grew up with was in fact a spy - a secret agent who worked behind enemy lines during World War II. Sworn to carry his secret to the grave, Thomas Franks begins to reveal the details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life and soon falls victim to dementia. As her father slips from her grasp, Franks must piece together the truth of his long-buried history and relive the painful memories that first forced them apart.
Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Franks' parents were locked in a pattern of recrimination and bitterness that left their daughters wondering what had ever united them. As an adult with children of her own, Franks finds the letters her father had written to her mother in the early days of World War II, and she glimpses a loving man full of warmth. But after the grimmest assignments of the war his tone shifts, settling into an all-too-familiar distance. Continuing her hunt for clues to the heart of the father she loves, her curiosity turns to intense research and detective work. Franks extracts stories from her father that demonstrate a man of remarkable bravery - posing as an SS officer, slipping behind enemy lines, reporting on the atrocities found at one of the first concentration camps liberated by the allies. He reveals stray fragments of his secret life - beyond the alcoholism and adultery that enraged his family - but only as his illness makes him unknowable to her.
Franks is left to seek the truth on her own - from buried paperwork, a bureaucracy designed to maintain secrets, and from the men who served alongside her father. She must weave memory and history into a full, human portrait of a complicated soul she never knew - father and spy, hero and everyman.
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Book details

• Format Hardcover
• Pages311 pages
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN10140135226X
• ISBN139781401352264