In This Dark House A Memoir

In 1939 the influential architect Berthold Lubetkin abruptly left his thriving career in London and dropped out of sight, moving with his wife to a desolate farm in rural Gloucestershire. Life in the house the Lubetkins named "World's End" was far from idyllic for their three children. Louise Kehoe and her siblings lived in an atmosphere of oppressive isolation, while their tyrannical fatherat times charming and witty but usually a terrorist in a self-styled Stalinist hellbadgered and belittled them during his fits of self-loathing. Even his true identity remained an enigma. That secret was never divulged during her father's lifetime, but Louise's quest to unearth its tragic originsher relentless piecing together of the clues she found after his deathis a remarkable story, written with extraordinary grace, style, and imagination, of an identity and a heritage lost and found.

LOUISE KEHOE is a writer and garden designer who lives in New Hampshire.<i> In This Dark House</i> won the National Jewish Book Award in 1995 and, in the United Kingdom, the <i>Jewish Quarterly</i>–Wingate Prize in 1997.