This is the only love story I am ever likely to write . . .
In her first memoir, acclaimed novelist Louise Doughty introduces us to her parents, Ken and Avis, and tells their story in reverse – beginning at the end of their lives and tracing them back over fifty years to uncover the secret origin of their love affair.
After her parents’ deaths, Louise and her siblings embark upon the extended process of clearing out the East Midlands bungalow where they had grown up. Just before its sale is completed, she stumbles upon a battered black suitcase containing a treasure trove, in which she discovers how her parents had broken each other’s hearts and mended them, and how most of her views about them are wrong.
Honest and tender, heartbreaking and funny, this is a story about grief and loss and family, but most of all, it’s a story about love. Transporting us to the 1950s to meet two young, working-class people with a mountain to overcome but full of hope and spirit, it explores one of life’s great mysteries – the lives of our parents before we existed – and the joyful impossibility of unravelling the mysteries of the human heart.
In her first memoir, acclaimed novelist Louise Doughty introduces us to her parents, Ken and Avis, and tells their story in reverse – beginning at the end of their lives and tracing them back over fifty years to uncover the secret origin of their love affair.
After her parents’ deaths, Louise and her siblings embark upon the extended process of clearing out the East Midlands bungalow where they had grown up. Just before its sale is completed, she stumbles upon a battered black suitcase containing a treasure trove, in which she discovers how her parents had broken each other’s hearts and mended them, and how most of her views about them are wrong.
Honest and tender, heartbreaking and funny, this is a story about grief and loss and family, but most of all, it’s a story about love. Transporting us to the 1950s to meet two young, working-class people with a mountain to overcome but full of hope and spirit, it explores one of life’s great mysteries – the lives of our parents before we existed – and the joyful impossibility of unravelling the mysteries of the human heart.
Reviews
A mystery, a love letter, a family history, this astonishing memoir is written with compassion and humour, a tribute to two people caught in the conventions of the time and a lesson in forgiveness and understanding. A wonderful book by a great writer
Beautiful and oddly thrilling: a heartfelt meditation on something we all know but rarely talk about - the fact that people, even those closest to us, are ultimately unknowable, that our pasts make strangers of us all. I was very moved and stayed up late into the night to finish it
Tender and clear-eyed, Doughty opens the Pandora's box of 1950s England, class, family and loss and forbidden love and - oh god - that great mysterious secret: our parents before us. It will make you laugh and make you cry
When the foreword gives you goosebumps, you know you're on a winner . . . This isn't just a fabulous trip down memory lane, it's a brilliant exploration of norms and expectations of that time, a lens on how those norms and expectations affected ordinary people and how, with the slightest shift, our family trees could have grown so very differently. It's also the most beautiful love story . . . I adored every single page, and it is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful memoirs I have ever read . . . Reading this book felt like sitting with a friend and having a truly wonderful conversation. The kind of conversation you don't want to end
What a brave book, haunting, visceral and beautifully written - it will surely stir everyone's feelings around family and the hazy depths of the lives behind us
I relished reading this loving, generous and unflinching recollection of the life cycle of a suburban family and the secrets the parents hid from their children. It is quietly elegant and deeply reflective
Tender, thoughtful, beautifully written, this is a wonderful and gentle memoir about childhood and class, loss and memory - I loved it