India, July 18 -- On the cover of The Girl from Fergana is a depiction of a wooden tea chest crammed with folded letters, a render from a photo that appears inside the book. Originally built to convey goods from China to the world, this tea chest had been repurposed to store paper that could not be thrown away. Letters, photographs, bills and bus tickets form the accidental archive of the author's mother: Stella Freud. In the first snapshot of her, Freud is a magician-like folder of paper, viewed from the eyes of her children in front of whom folded paper lotuses materialize, inscribed with numbers that when unfolded reveal fortunes. Folding paper as a creative act becomes the author's biographical methodology making connections to the st...