Cathy’s father was the grandson of the “Czech Thomas Edison.” While she grew up in the American suburbs, he was raised in Bohemian castles adorned with old master paintings and chauffeurs at the ready. When he fled Prague in 1948 to avoid conscription in the communist-backed Czech army, he left behind fame, an industrialist’s fortune, an entire family and his country.

Forty-five years later, as the iron curtain crumbled and democracy took hold, Cathy and her father travelled to Prague to begin an eleven-year journey of reclamation and restitution. Amidst years of bureaucratic wrangling, family revelations and Cathy’s move to Prague, they discovered something far more valuable than material treasures. They found one another.

And All the Inbetweens is a richly illustrated, graphic memoir about love and loss, legacy and liberation. It’s about fish ponds and Tintoretto, expats and peasants, booze and being the child of an immigrant. It’s about needing to travel 6000 miles in order to grow up and find your way home.

This father-daughter tale is an exploration into the complexity of the human heart and how, if we’re brave enough to look, we can find gifts everywhere—in the victories and the struggles.

A LOOK INSIDE…

INTO THE FISUURE

“I was nine the first time I saw you cry…I picked at my food and felt you slip away. I watched you crack and into the fissure I fell.”

THE ENVELOPES

“We all knew. Inside the envelopes weren’t letters but feelings. Treacherous feelings. Feelings that could take you away. No wonder they unnerved me.”

YOUR MOTHER

“Patriarchy had your mother by the throat… A woman subsumed by men—and her own demons.”

PAVLINA

“Her hair, the tilt of her nose, the shape of her lips, the look in her eye. It was undeniable. She was me. I was her.”

FAR AWAY CLOSE

“Peering over your shoulder, I stared at the black and white image of a brooding old mansion. It was a mysterious world as far from mine as the moons of Jupiter. But to you, it was home—a castle called Stadlec.”

THE STROKE

“You did the thing I’d been wanting you to do forever. You snapped, you growled, you yelled back.”