Little Eden
A Child at War
Eva Figes

Eva Figes was a child in 1939 when her family fled Germany and settled in a London suburb. To escape the daily bombings, Eva was sent to a small, unconventional school in the country town of Cirencester. The town—rooted in old traditions bu now crowded with soldiers, evacuees, and refugees—and the school itself were to become Eva’s “little Eden,” a place of respite from the war and the setting for a formative period in her life. Here, Eva was to discover the world of books and writing, to begin to form her sensibility as a writer and to reckon with her identity as a Jew.
In Little Eden, Figes looks back on this experience and offers a memoir about childhood and war combined. Interweaving a history of Cirencester with her own, she provides a penetrating look at English society and the British war effort as well as a unique portrait of a sensitive young German-Jewish girl displaced from her homeland, beginning a lifelong involvement with British culture.

“A wise and witty book... Figes has a wonderfully wry eye and ear for the rich streak of eccentricity in the English personality.”
—Florence King, New York Newsday

“Eva Figes is at her sharp, hilarious best...”
—The New York Times Book Review

Eva Figes is the author of many novels, as well as the non-fiction works Patriarchal Attitudes and Sex & Subterfuge. She died in 2012. 

Paperback / $8.95 (Can $11.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-137-8 / 140 pages / Memoir