A memoir about what it means to be a man.
Howard Cunnell has a Ph.D. from the University of London, and has been a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Sussex. He is the editor of Jack Kerouac's On the Road: The Original Scroll, which the New York Times described as 'the living version for our time'. A former professional scuba-diving instructor, he lives in London with his wife and children.
There is so much aching love in this book, such pain and beauty.
Behold, and rejoice
*Tim Winton, author of Cloudstreet*
This book tells the story of how family is made. It tells it
frankly, unexpectedly and in such a way that both family and
expectations are rewritten and renewed. I couldn't put it down.
Bold, brave, beautiful - much more than biology. This is life
itself.
*Jackie Kay, author of Red Dust Road*
A miracle of a book: sad, wise, strong and hopeful, its depiction
of parenthood will stay with me for a long time
*Sunjeev Sahota, author of The Year of the Runaways *
Fathers and Sons is a beautiful, moving, and marvellously honest
book. I relished its resolutely masculine point of view, especially
on such a subject, and the tenderness and sensuality with which
Cunnell depicts child-rearing.
*Kate Clanchy, author of Antigona and Me*
With Fathers & Sons, Howard Cunnell rips himself apart and reminds
us what true artists do with all the mistakes they've ever made.
They turn them into art. Dazzling and memorable, here is a strong
and moving mosaic depicting the wayward mystery of our souls
*Austin Collings, author of The Myth of Brilliant
Summers*
Howard Cunnell has forged from the most painful of raw materials a
modern masterpiece of fiction. . . The lonelieness of a boy who
never knew his father, Jason, who in turn became a father to Jay, a
boy trapped in the wrong female body. Their journeys are rendered
in prose as exquisite as the spaces of sea, sun and freedom Cunnell
always chased for salvation and worked so hard to describe, finally
finding himself and that redemption in the gift that was denied to
him: being a father to a son
*Cathi Unsworth, author of Weirdo*
Cunnell's memoir Father and Sons explores what it is to come from a
family, what it is to start one, and what it is to raise one. It
explores what we do to each other within that embrace, bad and
good, and what we can do better, even while we fail. Cunnell's
memoir is cast in light, and water, and bodies. It is a memoir
burnished with love and goodwill. It will leave you watching the
world differently
*Naomi Wood, author of Mrs. Hemingway*
A riveting work, remarkable and beautifully written, Fathers & Sons
takes you to utterly unexpected places.
*Chris Salewicz, Redemption Song: The Definitive
Biography of Joe Strummer*
Jumping with beautiful compression through decades, handsomely
written, honest and deeply moving, Cunnell's remarkable memoir is a
work of guts, grit, and love.
*Richard House, author of The Kills*
I admire Cunnell's eye, his precise notation of light and water,
whether in Mexico or Brixton, and the emotional commitment of his
book. There is a resilience here that is on intimate terms with
powerlessness.
*Adam Mars-Jones*
Essential reading. Agonisingly beautiful and honest. One man's
uncompromising testament to love.
*Sarah Winman, author of When God Was A Rabbit*
Spell-binding, life force of a memoir . . . For this book is all
kinds of exceptional: an urgent, agonising exploration of
fatherhood, masculinity and family; a testament to the power of the
written word to reach out to us in dark times; and, above all, a
hymn to the "shaping axe" of human love: motherly love, sibling
love, erotic love, and ultimately, the transcending love of a
father for a child, his in all but biology. And how, fragile as it
may sometimes seem, that love can conquer a whole sea of
strife.
*The Bookseller*
This spellbinding life force of a memoir... In a little over 200
pages, this book manages to be all kinds of exceptional: an urgent,
agonising exploration of fatherhood, masculinity and family and a
testament to the power of the written word to reach out to us in
dark times. Above all, it is a hymn to the 'shaping axe' of human
love: motherly love, sibling love, erotic love and, ultimately, the
transcending love of a father for a child, his in all but biology.
Fragile as it may sometimes seem, love can conquer a whole sea of
strife.
*Daily Express*
Truly heart-stopping writing: a unique and hard-won perspective
unfolded in lucid and unforgettable prose
*Financial Times*
This tender yet hard-boiled memoir is a searing exploration of
parenting and gender-creation…Cunnell deserves the accolades he
will receive for his book’s painterly, masculine honesty
*Socialist Review*
It is one of the most good-hearted, big-souled books I’ve read, a
memoir about what it means to be a man, but more importantly what
it means to be a parent. I don’t cry easily, but I read the final
pages through a luminous wash of tears.
*Guardian*
Dazzlingly beautiful...this is truly heart-stopping writing
*Financial Times*
Artfully written, a meditation as much as a memoir, the fragments
of his life presented with a novelist’s eye for detail and language
... images of brightness, of sun and shadow, make a prism of the
book. Narrow ideas of what makes a father, what makes a son, are
opened out into a rainbow of possibilities.
*New Statesman*
A moving account of the unpredictable forms of parenthood and
childhood across three generations.
*Observer*
In a publishing year packed with brilliant writing, nothing stopped
my heart quite like Howard Cunnell’s Fathers & Sons. A fragmentary
but utterly lucid multigenerational memoir in which the experience
of fatherhood and the demands of masculinity are delicately parsed
from all possible angles, it stood out for me for the extraordinary
quality of Cunnell’s prose: glancing, agile, heartsore,
preternaturally perceptive and above all, tender. A unique, and
uniquely beautiful, book.
*Melissa Harrison Author of At Hawthorn Time *
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