My Father's Fortune: A Life

My Father's Fortune: A Life

by Michael Frayn (Author)

Synopsis

'An unknown place.' This was what Michael Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, My Father's Fortune sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As Frayn tries to see it through the eyes of 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 disadvantages and shouldered many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again. Father and son were in some ways incredibly 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 along the way. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 01 Sep 2011

ISBN 10: 057127059X
ISBN 13: 9780571270590
Book Overview: Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards in 2010, My Father's Fortune, Michael Frayn's searching and moving memoir, sets out to discover his family's past.

Media Reviews
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
Author Bio
Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, The Trick of It and A Landing on the Sun. Headlong (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Spies (2002) won the Whitbread Best Novel Award. His most recent novel, Skios, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His fifteen plays range from Noises Off to Copenhagen and, most recently, Afterlife. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.