From Cairo to Austin: exiled at 12, Michele Kay takes her readers on a gut-wrenching, painfully lonely, but often exhilarating journey to “home.’’

Through this memoir she tells the intensively personal stories of her family’s expulsion from Egypt during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and devastating effects of this displacement on their lives.

No matter where her nomadic life took her—London, Hong Kong, Saigon, San Francisco, Paris, Tel Aviv, Washington, Texas—Michele proved, as she once wrote: “life is a series of opportunities…to grab.” Mother of two, grandmother of five, she was often described as a “fireball who thought fast, wrote fast and spoke very fast.”

Inspiring, fascinating: a reassuring story for anyone faced with unwanted, unexpected twists and turns in life. And that would be, of course, all of us.