Overview

In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life as he became afflicted with Alzheimer's. His exploits revealed a man of remarkable bravado--posing as a Nazi guard, slipping behind enemy lines to blow up ammunition dumps, and being flown to one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies to report on the atrocities found there. My Father's Secret War is an intimate account of Franks coming to know her own father after years of estrangement. Looking back at letters he had written her mother in the early days of WWII, Franks glimpses a loving man full of warmth. But after the grimmest assignments of the war his tone shifts, settling into an all-too-familiar distance. Franks learns about him--beyond the alcoholism and adultery--and comes to know the man he once was. Her story is haunting, and beautifully told, even as the tragedy becomes clear: Franks finally comes to know her father, but only as he is slipping further into his illness. Lucinda Franks understands her father as the disease claims him. My Father's Secret War is a triumph of love over secrets, and a tribute to the power of the connection of family.

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"My Father's Secret War combines the heart-stopping suspense of a great thriller and the heart-melting pathos of a great family saga. It is an entirely new chapter in the complex history of fathers and daughters-and America."" -- ""Mary Gordon, New York Times bestselling author of Final Payments"" My Father's Secret War tells the story of a devoted daughter's search to understand a father broken and drained by the Second World War--a father who at the same time attracts, repels, and obsesses her. Lucinda Franks' memoir is a fascinating combination of sensitivity, suspense, and mystery told against the Nazi nightmare."" -- ""Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian"" ""Here is one of the most original memoirs of our time-an unsparing double portrait of an elusive and mysterious man and the daughter determined to learn the fullest truth about his life. Richly documented by the author's research into US military intelligence records and her father's private correspondence, My Father's Secret War moves with the dramatic and moral urgency of a Graham Greene novel."" -- ""Joyce Carol Oates"" ""Lucinda Franks' personal quest to learn more about 'her father's secret war' is a moving suspense story, brilliantly written and suffused with sensitivity and yearning."" -- ""Elie Wiesel"""

Author Information

Journalist Lucinda Franks won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for her national reporting. She has been writing for the New York Times since the mid-1970s, also contributing to The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Travel and Leisure, People, and New York magazine, among others. Her novel, Wild Apples, was published in 1991. She is married to New York City district attorney Robert Morgenthau and has two children. She lives in New York City. Joyce Bean is an accomplished audiobook narrator and director. In addition to having won several AudioFile Earphones Awards, she has been nominated multiple times for the prestigious Audie Award. Equally adept at narrating fiction and nonfiction, and she also narrates audiobooks under the name Jane Brown.

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