From his early infancy John de St Jorre retained a shard of memory of a woman wearing ‘a loose blouse, half-open, revealing large breasts. She had blue eyes and blonde hair framing a full, plump face. Smoke curled upwards from her cigarette. She looked at me, threw back her head, and laughed … She sounded happy and that made me happy too. She seemed familiar, someone close to me, and I suppose that is why I thought of her as my mother. Who else could she be? Then she vanished.’

This book is the story of the author’s lifelong attempt to recover that lost vision. After years of intermittent searching – he was a busy foreign correspondent for The Observer for many years, covering mainly Africa and the Middle East – he succeeded. It is a deeply affecting