Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir

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.

• BELOVED AND AWARD WINNING WRITER. Marina Warner is one of the world’s best loved novelists and short story writers, known also for her prolific nonfiction, often on myth and feminism. She has been everything from chair of judges for the Booker to president of the RSL. She is Booker shortlisted, and has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the British Academy Medal for lifetime achievement.

• POST-WAR STORY OF CHILDHOOD IN CAIRO. Marina offers a vision of a lost post-war world. She tells the wartime romance of her parents in all its complexity (the difficulties she discovered from her mother’s diaries later on, the clash of cultures in wartime England), and the story of her own childhood, adolescence and life thereafter.

Competition: Rosie; Motherwell; I Am I Am I Am; Out of Egypt; My Year of Magical Thinking; The Yacoubian Building. Rose Tremain; Deborah Orr; Maggie O’Farrell; Nina Stibbe; Joan Didion; Andre Aciman; Alaa Al Aswany