Book description
'Exquisitely written and wonderfully readable - There are tears,
laughter and filial tenderness on every page of Tim Jeal's perfect gem
of a book.' Val Hennessy, Daily Mail An exquisite and moving portrait
of a deeply eccentric father. Tim Jeal's beautifully nuanced memoir is
by turns lyrical, poignant and gloriously funny. 'Jeal's prose is so
sprightly, his interweaving of time-schemes so skilful, and his
'ordinary' story so touching that his book feels completely fresh - At
its heart is an unusually engrossing account of parental oddity,
marital resilience and filial complexity.' Andrew Motion, Guardian
'This is a marvellous book: funny, vivid, immensely touching and
beautifully constructed.' John Preston, Evening Standard 'A pleasure
to read: unpretentious, moving, full of jokes but also unobtrusively
wise.' Anne Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph
Tim Jeal is an acclaimed novelist and biographer, whose Stanley: The
Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer was published by Faber in
2007 and was a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week'. Stanley was named
Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and, in the US, won the National
Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography for 2007. Tim's memoir Swimming
with my Father was published by Faber in 2004 and was also a BBC Radio
Four 'Book of the Week' and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize
for autobiography. In September 2011 Faber will publish Explorers of the
Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure, which,
thanks to much original research, will shed fascinating new light on the
'Search for the Nile' and its colonial consequences. In 1973 Tim Jeal's
Livingstone (1973) was selected as a 'Notable Book of the Year' by the
New York Times Book Review and one of the 'Best and Brightest of the
Year' by the Washington Post Book World. Livingstone formed the basis
for a BBC TV documentary and a film for the Discovery Channel. It has
never been out of print. Nor has Tim Jeal's Baden-Powell (1989), which
was a 'Notable Book of the Year', and was chosen by Channel 4 for its
'Secret Lives' strand. In 1975 Tim was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys
Memorial Prize.
