Overview

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A poignant memoir of love, trauma, and recovery after a life-changing stroke, twinned to a powerful account of his father's experience in World War II, by a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. “A beautiful, compelling memoir...Raban’s final work is a gorgeous achievement.” —Ian McEwan, New York Times best-selling author of Lessons  In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn’t move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had suspected: that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center, where he became acquainted with, and struggled to accept, the limitations of his new body—learning again how to walk and climb stairs, attempting to bathe and dress himself, and rethinking how to write and even read. Woven into these pages is an account of a second battle, one that his own father faced in the trenches during World War II. With intimate letters that his parents exchanged at the time, Raban places the budding love of two young people within the tumultuous landscape of the war’s various fronts, from the munition-strewn beaches of Dunkirk to blood-soaked streets of Anzio. Moving between narratives, his and theirs, Raban artfully explores the human capacity to adapt to trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humor that persist despite it. The result is Father and Son, a powerful story of mourning, but also one of resilience.

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9780593863152

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Reviews

“A world war fought on three fronts by a young artillery officer; a courtship, marriage, and forced separation in a hesitant, old-fashioned English style; a sudden, devastating upheaval in the author’s own life — Jonathan Raban deploys the skills of an accomplished novelist to braid these elements into a beautiful, compelling memoir drawn from his parents’ wartime love letters. He is a master, as he has shown in his legendary travel writing, of summoning place and people with vivid economy. Haunting Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban’s final work, is a gorgeous achievement.”—Ian McEwan, author of Lessons “[Raban is] always a lucid, perceptive writer. . . . His experiences as a patient will ring true to anyone who has spent significant time in the hospital. . . . [Father and Son is] a touching farewell from a careful, thoughtful observer of life.”—Kirkus Reviews “This exceptional posthumous memoir . . . runs on two equally rewarding tracks. . . . Raban catalogs ‘the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration’ with warmth and intellectual rigor, effortlessly weaving together personal history and literary critique. Tirelessly researched and told with remarkable candor, this often breathtaking memoir is a worthy successor to Raban’s hero’s.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Information

JONATHAN RABAN is the author of the novels Surveillance and Waxwings; his nonfiction works include Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, and Driving Home. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. Raban died in 2023.

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