Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2010.
Costa Book Awards 2010 Judges' comment: "A delightful and wholly unsentimental memoir that balances beautifully the twin responses of tears and laughter."
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 4 November 2010.
Shifting from personal recollection to documentary sources, family anecdotes to historical records, Michael Frayn’s autobiographical record is a superb look at family relationships and growing up. His father, the central pivot of the book, is wonderfully observed and we are given a portrait of a man who by force of personality, ability and drive journeyed far from the poverty that marked his early life.
Written at the insistence of his own children, Michael Frayn’s book is also a gift to his father, Tom Frayn, a seemingly ordinary man in the crowd, made extraordinary by this memoir. Has to be one of my books of the year.
Like for Like Reading
Stuff: A Memoir of Life and Death, Martin Rowson
Maps of My Life, Guy Browning
'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.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Recommendations: |
'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.
My Father's Fortune : A Life features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations
Paperback. £11.69, down from the £12.99 cover price. In Stock.
My Father's Fortune : A Life was written by Michael Frayn and published by Faber and Faber
My Father's Fortune : A Life has 255 pages
£11.69, reduced from £12.99. In Stock.
