My Father's Fortune

'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 his parents and the others who shaped his life, he comes to realise how little he 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. Father and son were in some odd ways ridiculously alike, in others ridiculously different; and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father - and makes one or two surprising discoveries about both of them along the way ...

ISBN 057127059X   Pages 272 ISBN13 9780571270590 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 223 Publisher Faber and Faber   Published in London Imprint Faber and Faber   Height (mm) 198 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 126 Publication date 01 Sep 2011   Spine width (mm) 17 DEWEY 828.91409   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

“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

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