In 2006 journalist Joanna Moorhead discovered that her father&s cousin Prim who had disappeared many decades earlier was now a famous artist in Mexico Although rarely spoken of in her own family (regarded as a black sheep a wild child; someone they were better off without) in the meantime Leonora Carrington had become a national treasure in Mexico where she now lived while her paintings are fetching ever-higher prices at auction today Intrigued by her story Joanna set off to Mexico City to find her lost relation Later she was to return to Mexico ten times more between then & Leonora&s death in 2011 sometimes staying for months at a time & subsequently travelling around Britain & through Europe in search of the loose ends of her tale They spent days talking & reading together drinking tea & tequila going for walks & to parties & eating take away pizzas or dining out in her local restaurants as Leonora told Joanna the wild & amazing truth about a life that had taken her from the suffocating existence of a debutante in London via war-torn France with her lover Max Ernst to incarceration in an asylum & finally to the life of a recluse in Mexico City Leonora was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s a founding member of the Women&s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s & a woman whose reputation will survive not only as a muse but as a novelist & a great artist This book is the extraordinary story of Leonora Carrington&s life & of the friendship between two women related by blood but previously unknown to one another whose encounters were to change both their lives