Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies

"Tish Alsop was a charming, beautiful, well-born war bride of a handsome, dashing, brainy war hero-turned-famous-journalist. They lived together at the center of an elite social group, the 'Georgetown set, ' at a time when Washington basically ran the world. But Tish, while brave and stoic, was often lonely and sad and, at times, silently, secretly, desperate. Her daughter, Elizabeth, has written a moving memoir, at once chilling and loving, of her lifelong search for her mother." --Evan Thomas, author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA

"A beautifully written, deeply honest, memoir. The tales of London during the blitz, and the inside look at the author's family life when her parents lived at the center of power in Cold War Washington are both compelling and revealing. Most of all, Winthrop illuminates her mother's life with poignancy, sympathy and understanding while chronicling with clarity their often complicated relationship." --Stephen Schlesinger, author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala

"While deftly evoking the glamour of high society, both in London and in Washington DC, and the tight-lipped secrecy born of war-time espionage - MI 5 and CIA are almost household entities in this family - Elizabeth Winthrop tells how her mother Tish Alsop, having married her American sweetheart at eighteen, had to cope with twelve - twelve! - successive pregnancies and how she struggled with loneliness and addiction, yet maintained her ironic humor to the end. As a daughter, Winthrop is compassionate and clear-eyed; as a writer, she is elegant, even-handed, witty, and incisive, showing that no amount of privilege can protect a woman from misery, and that a stiff upper lip is no solution to pain. The last pages are almost unbearably poignant. Among the chronicles of mother-daughter relationships, this fine memoir gives a fierce lesson in empathy." --Rosalind Brackenbury, author of Without Her and Becoming George Sand

"Daughter of Spies is a fascinating trip to a country--and a capital--that no longer exists. Part memoir, part elegiac tribute to the author's mother, it is also the story of an extraordinary family that had a powerful influence upon the political and social life of postwar Washington, D.C. In Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's book, the Georgetown set comes back to life." --Gregg Herken, author of The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington

"It is an extraordinary challenge for anyone to write a compelling, emotionally honest, personal memoir. To write one in parallel with the public life of a nation that unspools alongside--in this case, much of the 20th-century history of our country--is almost unimaginably difficult. Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, in Daughter of Spies, a recounting of her parents' long marriage as well as her family's prominent role in the affairs of postwar America, has managed this brilliantly, and has done so with perception, wit, humor and enormous compassion. This is the story of a family through the lens of history. Intensely moving, and beautifully done."--Geoffrey Douglas, author of Class: The Wreckage of an American Family