The Lost Studio

In this astonishing mystery, family memoir and cultural history, Karen Liebreich investigates the life and death of her aunt, the artist Edith Borger, who was murdered in Paris in 1970 along with her baby. In 2021, over fifty years after her aunt's murder, Karen Liebreich received a strange email from a French couple. They'd found Edith's studio boarded up exactly as she'd left it: a body of work unseen and untouched for decades. Crucially, this included forty years of Edith's diaries, filled with astonishing insights which might finally explain the circumstances of her tragic death. The Lost Studio is Karen Liebreich's attempt to piece together her aunt's miraculous life, drawing on Edith's evocative, meticulously kept diaries to tell the story of a singular woman whose life was shaped by displacement, ambition and the search for belonging. Born in the 1930s to a Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic, Edith spent her childhood as a war refugee in England, moving between London, Tel Aviv and Paris, where she finally settled in her 30s to study art. Despite many years of struggle - and now a mother, separated from her husband Robert - Edith was finally on the precipice of success, brushing elbows with the likes of Picasso and Man Ray. That's until, one night, all of it was taken away from her. Set against the Nuremberg trials, the rise of the Iron Curtain and the Prague Spring, this is an unforgettable journey through the great upheavals of twentieth-century Europe, and a stunning evocation of bohemian Paris in the 1960s. Through the rediscovered studio and its amazing contents, The Lost Studio brings a sweeping history, an extraordinary artist and the mystery surrounding her murder, vividly to life.