The Box with the Sunflower Clasp: Uncovering a Jewish Family's Flight to Wartime Shanghai

'A transfixingly readable amalgam of memoir and history... Superbly written and researched.... [Meller] has turned the raw material of her life into literature'
Ian Thomson, author of Primo Levi

Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents tha...