Love Child

• Inside a legendary American family: Allegra Huston was the third child of John Huston’s fourth wife, the beautiful ballet dancer Ricki Soma. In this graceful, penetrating memoir, Allegra takes us into the world of a child unmoored by her mother’s sudden death and sent on an odyssey which took her from John Huston’s fabulous estate in Ireland, to the American suburbs, to a hidden paradise in Mexico—and, at the side of her older sister Anjelica, into the hilltop retreats of Jack Nicholson, Ryan O’Neal, and Marlon Brando. Allegra paints a vivid, caring, and affecting portrait of her parents and the luminous circle of friends, acquaintances, lovers, and artists who were a part of family life. .

• A revelatory twist and family connection: At the age of twelve Allegra Huston discovered her biological father to be the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich. Suffused with a quiet intensity of emotion, Love Child explores family secrets and family bonds, and the unreliable certainties of memory—and ends with an unexpected triumph..