New York: Putnam, (1955.) dj. Hardcover first edition - The second published novel of this writer, who was born in Germany but who was sent by her parents to study in Geneva in 1935 and who went to England in 1938 as an unpaid mother's helper. Although English was her third language, that is the language she wrote in. As with all her novels, her own experiences are retrieved and transmuted - it begins with the young woman at the center of the story surviving a shipwreck in an open boat, as her parents sacrificed themselves to ensure that she would live - just as her parents, who were killed at Auschwitz and Terezin, did. Talbot's friendship with poet Elizabeth Bishop has been preserved in the more than 400 letters which passed between them.