My Father's Fortune: A Life

Description

A delightful and uncommonly honest memoir of Michael Frayn's father and of his own childhood, written in the spirit of enquiry that so characterises one of our most distinguished and cherished authors. 'An unknown place.' This was what Michael Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. In this book he sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As he tries to see it through the eyes of its inhabitants - his parents and some of the others who shaped his life - he comes to realise how little he himself ever knew or understood about them. This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame so many disadvantages and shouldered so many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him in a single instant, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, The Trick of It and A Landing on the Sun. Headlong (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while his novel, Spies (2002), won the Whitbread Novel Award. His fifteen plays range from Noises Off to Copenhagen and most recently Afterlife. He is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin.

"After the brilliant plays-both comic and cerebral-and the subtle novels, one of our best contemporary writers has made the family memoir his own. Not a line, still less a thought, is stale or predictable." -Anne Chisholm, "The Daily Telegraph "(UK) "Genuinely delving, yet decently guarded, "My Father's Fortune" is often very funny and soaked in a wistful sort of melancholy that deepens into a compelling sadness. Frayn has written books that make a bigger bang, but none that is so touching." -Andrew Motion, "The Guardian "(UK) "Ranging from comic star turns to passages of piercingly lucid melancholy, "My Father's Fortune" adroitly modulates between humor and tragedy, ruefulness and celebration, intellectual keenness and elegiac depths of feeling. A writer who has long been one of our most engrossingly inquiring minds, Frayn has never written with more searching brilliance than in this quest for his p