Inventory of a Life Mislaid

From one of our most iconic writers, a luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure, loss, and the banks of the Nile.
Marina Warner was born in 1946 to an English father and an Italian mother who had met during the war. In this beautiful memoir, Warner reaches back to their wartime meeting, romance, and the precarious tale of her wilful mother making the difficult move to London, landing in England with an outsider’s eyes. Marina would spend her childhood in Cairo, in a time when Egypt was in revolution and tumult, her parents were running a bookshop, and her beautiful, young mother was swishing out every night to go dancing, in rustling skirts and jewels.
The story is charted by the objects of Marina’s life — her mother’s wedding ring, worn down thin as a silk thread. A razor used to shave her hair close to the skull as a child. A film cylinder with negatives of burned Cairo, following the anti-British protests and riots of 1952.
Evocative and imaginative, Warner offers a memoir that powerfully resurrects the post-war world. In Marina’s recollections, the river Lethe often feels as real as the Nile. Cairo in her memory is a chimera, at once a vital place of childhood and life, and a city of the dead.