Family Romance

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Number of Pages: 256

I found out that both the name and the date of birth I had known my mother by were false. What I didn’t know was when or why or how she had taken on a new identity. And what it means for the story of her life, and my father’s life, and mine. So I set out to find out the story of my mother’s life, which is also the story of my father’s life, and to an extent far greater than I had realised when I began this journey, the story of mine too. Family Romance is a beautifully written memoir in which John Lanchester pieces together his parents’ history, their extraordinary secrets, the shape of their shared life and how their actions and omissions made him who he is. From his father’s devastating wartime separation from his parents to his mother Julia’s tragic first love, her decision to become a nun and her adoption of her sister’s identity, Lanchester illuminates their characters and explores their motives with moving insight.