"I had to do something to escape Hitler's clutches," writes Esti Freud. Yet she waits with her then-16-year-old daughter, Sophie in Paris until German canons can be heard in the distance before deciding to escape by bicycle across France, as Sophie keeps looking back to see whether German tanks will overtake them. Both women survive and, in their own ways, come to feel a need to keep a personal record of those tumultuous times. Thus, in a memoir written at age 79, Esti Fraud, daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud and wife of his oldest son, Martin, looks back on her life starting before the 20th century, lived on three continents, and stretched through two world wars and the Holocaust. Twenty years after her mothers' death, daughter Sophie turned to Esti's memoir as the scaffold for this book, expanding it through family letters, archival material, and her own diary penned as a teenager. Out of these documents, Sophie Freud has created a many-voiced mosaic, including letters and insights from a wide cast of characters who tell the story of a famous family--and of a century.