Overview

'Joins the very front rank of memoirs of post-war Britain' DAVID KYNASTON 'A winning blend of personal memories, evoked with startling clarity, and fascinating social history' CLARE CHAMBERS In Red, Red Robin, Alison Light puts herself into history, conjuring her girlhood from the 1950s to the 1970s, growing up in an extended family in Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood - from her doll's house to her infant and teenage diaries, her comics and schoolbooks - she uses her own story to tell a richly-textured social history of post-war England: its popular culture and music, its language and humour. Warm, witty and often moving, Light recalls the all-singing, all-dancing little girl who becomes a grammar-school snob; the street kid turned fashion-conscious teenager, searching for the ideal boy, navigating a rapidly modernising world and a family life equally transformed. Going to university, she asks: what does it mean to leave home - and do we ever truly leave? Beautifully crafted and deeply pleasurable, Red, Red Robin is an exploration of the making of an English girl and of her sense of self. It asks whether we can retain a strong attachment to our place of origin - honouring our histories and beliefs - while resisting both nostalgia and disavowal. In this lyrical, analytical and politically astute memoir, one of our most compelling writers evokes a child's eye view of the past through the lens of her adult reflections, querying too how we document that past and the nature of memory itself.

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9781474619912

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Reviews

Remarkable, moving, illuminating. A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read * praise for A RADICAL ROMANCE, SPECTATOR * A remarkable achievement . . . should become a classic -- Margaret Drabble * praise for COMMON PEOPLE * A bold, impressive and important rewriting of a slice of British social history -- Hermione Lee * praise for MRS WOOLF & THE SERVANTS, GUARDIAN * By turns mesmeric and deeply moving: a poetic excavation of the very meaning of history * praise for COMMON PEOPLE, DAILY TELEGRAPH *

A winning blend of personal memories, evoked with startling clarity, and fascinating social history. As all the best memoirs do, Red, Red Robin made me reflect on my own upbringing and see the past again through the bewildered eyes of childhood -- CLARE CHAMBERS, author of SMALL PLEASURES A beautifully wrought book. Rich in personal, social and cultural detail. Shows us the complexity, strangeness and beauty of an individual life being created in a world still haunted and scarred by war. Honest, moving, optimistic -- DAVID ALMOND

Author Information

Alison Light is a writer and critic. Her book A Radical Romance won the PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. Her other books include the much-acclaimed Mrs Woolf and the Servants and Common People: The History of an English Family, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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