Overview

'Your brother looked healthy, happy, natural. But everything else about him is extremely odd. Not faintly odd. Extremely odd. Except in appearance. He's the opposite of you.' Quentin Crisp At the age of twenty-two, the youngest of five brothers, Jonathan Barrow, was killed with his fiancée in a car crash. He left behind the manuscript of a novel, The Queue, in which, among other things, he prophesied his own death. The story of a boy and a dachshund, populated by a kaleidoscopic menagerie of people and animals and an array of anthropomorphic in-betweens, The Queue is a vivid and irreverent portrayal of the world in which Jonathan and his awe-struck older brother Andrew were raised. Jonathan and his book form the framework of a remarkable study of a young man's inner and outer effervescence, his family, England and high and low society in the Swinging Sixties. Filled with fascinating and fantastical anecdotes, Animal Magic documents a heady and peripatetic childhood in Lancashire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, misadventures at home and school, and the early working life of the two brothers, on the lower rungs of show business, backstage at Claridge's, and finally in advertising. This spellbinding elegy negotiates love affairs, family tensions, exhibitions, publishers' rejections and precarious living in a flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. Punctuated with excerpts from The Queue and Jonathan's other bizarre and brilliant writings, Animal Magic is a book bursting with humour, wit and pathos and featuring an outlandish cast of characters, from an eccentric father, a mischievous family dog and a down-and-out ex-schoolmaster to curious stars of Swinging London like Mick Jagger and Tommy Cooper. It is a memoir unlike any other.

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9781787331471

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Reviews

A book unlike any other: it's about jokes and brothers and grief; it's about love and death and how much, and how little, you can ever know someone else. And, like all the best autobiographies, its also about the need to remember. Offbeat, obsessive, and often killingly funny. -- Craig Brown A very funny, original and touching memoir to a lost brother. -- Barry Humphries Animal Magic is exactly that... a funny, dark memoir. Think Tommy Cooper describing a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. -- Nicholas Haslam

Animal Magic is exactly that... a funny, dark memoir. Think Tommy Cooper describing a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. -- Nicholas Haslam A very funny, original and touching memoir to a lost brother. -- Barry Humphries A book unlike any other: it's about jokes and brothers and grief; it's about love and death and how much, and how little, you can ever know someone else. And, like all the best autobiographies, its also about the need to remember. Offbeat, obsessive, and often killingly funny. -- Craig Brown

Author Information

Andrew Barrow is a writer and journalist who regularly contributes to the pages of the Independent, Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He has written several works of non-fiction including Animal Magic: A Brother's Story and two novels. Andrew has been listening to other people's conversations since childhood. His various collections of overheard remarks have appeared in Vogue and Tatler, in a first collection called The Great Book of Small Talk, and in 2013's The Great Book of Mobile Talk. He lives in London.

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