In 2004 the feminist writer Susan Faludi set out to investigate someone she scarcely knew - her father. When she learned that the 76-year old - long estranged from her and living in Hungary - had undergone sex reassignment surgery, hers would become an extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world. How was this new parent who claimed to be "a complete woman now" connected to the silent, explosive and ultimately violent father that she had known, the ohotographer who'd built his career on the alteration of images?



Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood, a haunted family saga and her father's many previous incarnations: Ameriacan dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. Travelling to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hellbent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful - and virulent - nationhood. Here, the search for identity that has transfixed our century proves as treacherous for nations as for individuals.



This struggle to grasp her fathe's reinvented self takes her across borders - historical, political, religious - bringing Faludi face to face with the question of our age: Is identity something you "choose" or is it the very thing that you can't escape?



Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author The Terror Dream, Stiffed and Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's and the Baffler, among other publications.