For decades, she opens her riveting memoir, Donna Nebenzahl would unfold in her memory the tale of “a curly-haired brown-eyed girl living in a sun-drenched paradise overloaded with colour and adventure,” a charmed 1950s upbringing in which she was surrounded by “doting grandparents and flocks of aunts and uncles.

“I feasted on the apparent stability of my upbringing and ignored the rest,” she writes in To Linger With You ( Stonehewer Books , 248 pp, $25.95) .

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She and her brother “grew up thinking there was nothing strange about being raised by grandparents instead of parents, only glancingly aware that our father had died and knowing without understanding that our mother had made the choice to live in another country.”

Nebenzahl was four months old when her fathe

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