"House of Glass begins in 1901 in a shtetl in Poland, and ends in 1999 in Paris, London and New York. It tells of Alex and his siblings, Jacques, Henri and Sala, Freeman's adored grandmother, with whom she spent a lot of time in her native US. Jacques died in Auschwitz, but Freeman saw Alex a fair few times before his death in 1999, and met other members of the family at a one-off reunion in Deauville in 1983, when she was five. Her book, she insists, is a family story, just with a number of unusual real events, such as when, in the late 1970s, Henri and his wife, Sonia, were neighbours of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Château."