A sad and most unusual story stemming from a bottle Karen Liebreich found washed up on the shore. It had come from France and contained a letter from a mother grieving over the death of her son. This sets the author on a quest to find the woman by any means possible and solve the mystery of the message in the bottle. The paperback has been updated with the end to Karen Liebreich’s searching and how she finally got to understand this mother’s loss.
On a winter's day in 2002, a bottle shaped like a tear washed up on the Kent coast. It contained a letter written in French, a lock of hair, and a mystery. Only one thing could be known for certain - that the writer of the letter was a mother, grieving for her lost child, Maurice. Moved by the woman's heartache Karen Liebreich sets out on an epic journey to piece together the mother's story. Her book is the amazing true story of one woman's search for another, and a poignant reflection on love, loss and motherhood. In this revised edition Liebreich concludes her epic quest, finally meeting the woman who sent the bottle years before and coming to understand the loss that was at the heart of one mother's impulse to communicate with the unknown.
Karen Liebreich has a doctorate in history from Cambridge University and a research diploma from the European University Institute in Florence. She has worked as a cultural assistant for the French Institute in London, and has been a television documentary researcher and producer. She is the author of Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy and Scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio (2004) and The Letter in the Bottle: A True Story (2006).