Paperback edition. Leaving Guanabara details the idyllic growing up years of a young French girl born in Brazil while Europe, Asia and Africa are being destroyed by the Second World War. Unknown to the narrator, her father's family is being murdered in France by that same war. It takes the death of her mother to waken the narrator to the fact that her mother's dying wish will also make the narrator and her sister lose their country, friends, languages, music, foods, the caretakers they love, and their continent. The narrator's life becomes one of displacements, and a quest to discover the genealogy her parents felt should be kept secret. Guanabara, the magnificent bay that defines Rio's geography becomes a metaphor for those who lose what is most precious.