Wonderfully dark, relentlessly slippery ... I read this entire memoir with my breath held Julie Myerson, The Observer.

This Party's Got to Stop works Thomson's memories into a powerful mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic and often heartbreaking detail. It is both a love letter to a lost brother and a chronicle of the murderousness and longing that can characterize blood relationships.

Comparison: Glen Duncan, Jim Crace
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Synopsis

In his first venture into non-fiction, the celebrated novelist Rupert Thomson has produced one of the most extraordinary and unforgettable memoirs of recent years. On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers get word that their father, who suffered chronic lung damage during the war, has died alone in hospital. In an attempt to come to terms both with their own loss and with their parents' legacies, the three brothers move back into their father's house. The time they spend in this decadent, anarchic commune leads to a rift between Thomson and his youngest brother, a rift that will not be addressed for more than two decades. 

Reviews

 ‘Wonderfully dark, relentlessly slippery... I read this entire memoir with my breath held. It’s a piece of writing so desperately honest, so full of warmth and unease and emotional daring, that you can’t help but be pulled along’ Julie Myerson, Observer 

‘One of the most original British novelists at work today… a haunting, haunted work’
Boyd Tonkin, Independent 

‘A masterpiece… a humanely funny, wryly anarchic glance at how people we love impact on our lives’ Time Out

‘The nightmarish pallor of Thomson’s best novels pervades his memoir… written in the precise, wiry prose that brings hallucinatory intensity to his fiction’ Guardian

About the Author

Born on the south coast of England in 1955, Rupert Thomson was educated at Christ’s Hospital School. At the age of seventeen he won a scholarship to Cambridge University where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. In his twenties, he spent four years working as a copywriter in London, but in 1982 he moved to Italy where he started work on a novel. Dreams of Leaving was published in 1987, and was hailed in the Times as ‘extraordinarily elegant, evocative and funny’, while the New Statesman wrote: ‘When someone writes as well as Thomson does, it makes you wonder why other people bother.’ Since then, he has published six more highly acclaimed novels, two of which, Air and Fire and The Insult have been shortlisted for awards. Though his books consistently defy categorisation, the San Francisco Chronicle came closer than most when it described him as a ‘twisted British fabulist’. During the past twenty years he has lived in many cities, including London, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Rome. He currently lives in Barcelona. Photograph © Hugo Glendinning More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation