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 receive 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. 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.
‘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
Author
About Rupert Thomson
Rupert Thomson is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels, including The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time, Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and The Book of Revelation, which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. His memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, won the Writers’ Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2010. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Guardian, London Review of Books, Granta, and Independent. He lives in London.
