House of Glass

I stood up to shut the closet door and that's when I spotted the shoebox right at the back, behind a pile of leather handbags ... surely I thought it would contain another pair of slightly battered kitten heel sandals. So I sat on the floor, pulled it out and opened it. I did not find shoes. Instead it was filled with secrets my grandmother had managed to keep all her life and some years beyond. When Hadley Freeman found a shoebox filled with her French grandmother's treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of her grandmother, Sala, and her three siblings, Henri, Jacques and Alex Glass. The search takes Hadley from Picasso's archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Aushwitz. Hadley had only really known that her grandmother had met her American grandfather through her brother Alex in Paris, and that she travelled to America to marry him in the...