Françoise Frenkel was born in Poland in 1889. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, she opened the first French-language bookshop in Berlin with her husband. In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Frenkel fled to Paris. She sought refuge across occupied France for the next several years until finally escaping across the border to Switzerland, where she wrote a memoir documenting her refugee experience. Her memoir, originally published in 1945 as Rien où poser sa tête (No Place to Lay One’s Head), was rediscovered in an attic in southern France in 2010 and republished in the original French as well as in a dozen other languages. This is its first publication in the United States. Frenkel died in Nice in 1975.
Patrick Modiano is a bestselling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Mondial Cino Del
Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
Jilly Bond has worked extensively in theater and radio for many years. Her stage credits include Miranda in The Tempest, Fiona in When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout, and Anita in A Small Family Business. She is regularly heard in dramas for Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. She has won two AudioFile Earphones Awards for her audiobook narration.