Book of My Mother (UNESCO collection of representative works) - Hardcover

This is a moving memorial to his mother's life by Albert Cohen, the internationally renowned author of Belle du Seigneur. Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis in 1940. In 1943 he received news of his mother's death in Marseilles. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of articles for La France libre and revised them in 1954 for publication as Le Livre de ma mere (Book of My Mother). Since then the book has been translated into eleven languages. Cohen intended it as a tribute to all mothers: 'I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my song of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother.'.

Albert Cohen was born on the island of Corfu in 1895 and emigrated to France when he was five. During the 1930s he devoted himself to writing and after the fall of France spent seven years in London. After 1952 he resumed his literary activities, determined to complete his novel-cycle begun with Solal (1930) and Mangeclous (1938) and ending with Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valeureux (1969). Belle du Seigneur was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman. He died in 1981.