It is a true story. The original title is Au nom de tous les miens. The sites that claim it is fiction are usually "historical revisionists" ie Holocaust deniers. Here is a link that might be useful: Martin Gray's official website

My experience is just like yours, Sleeperblues. My only consistent reading these days is done at night, in bed. My granddaughter gave me a silver-spoon book mark engraved with "fell asleep here." :-) I loved The Great Alone, but haven't read any of her other books yet. However, this week I received Night Road, which I purchased used on eBay. It's "airing out" while I finish my current book. Firefly Lane has lots of great reviews on Amazon; I'm guessing all her books do, to one degree or another. I hadn't heard of her until my library gave me The Great Alone as a gift for doing a program last year.

I can relate to "not knowing where to start", but about work in general. After Jody died, I really let things go. I fed the animals and did a little picking up around the place. Some days I dealt better than others. Now a year later, I am so behind on everything. I feel much better, but it is hot, hard work. I am getting ready to hire someone to come here and get control of the yard....which is about 3 acres, and mow the pasture for me. I need to fertilize the hay field, but the cost of fertilizer has skyrocketed. I don't even feed that hay because my horses are old and I feed them hay better suited for them, which was expensive to begin with and out of sight, I am sure now. But, Nicole's suggestion of organizing containers is excellent. I don't have room here like when we had an 10 room house before we moved, so I am putting away everything except the bare essentials, to sell them. I asked my daughter if she wanted anything. I had hoped she would at least wanted Grandma's old cookie jar, but she didn't grow up with it, so I am sure some cookie jar collector will love it.

Another good book by David Fairchild (an American botanist and plant explorer, said to have introduced more than 200,000 plants including agricultural edible varierites into the US) along those travel importing of plants lines is The World was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer by David Fairchild.