The River Never Left Her

In present-day Zürich, an American expat, Emily Benz, buys a set of personal archives at an online auction, setting off an investigation into the life of a British woman raised in the early part of the twentieth century in China. What seemed like an innocuous tin of bonbons sold by a grandson soon turns into a can of worms that can't be closed again, revealing family dysfunction that stretches back generations, a fairy-tale childhood, four marriages and a liaison. Emily must reconcile the woman's adult biography with the vivid memoir of China seen through the eyes of a child. This most unexpected memoir moves between China at the turn of the last century, scandal in the high society of 1920s England, and a tenacious widow living in the Switzerland of today.

Emily Benz was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University, she began teaching and travelling in the far east where she lived for two years. She married in 1970 and has lived in Switzerland ever since. She studied psychology and Chinese at the University of Zürich and teaches English as a foreign language.

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