Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father

Description

An extremely funny, painful and perceptive book about family relations When his widowed father - once a high court judge and always a formidable figure - drifted into vagueness if not dementia, the writer Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship. Kid Gloves is a highly entertaining book about (among other things) families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity. It is necessarily also a book about the writer himself - and the implausible, long-delayed moment, some years before, when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation. The supporting cast includes Ian Fleming, the Moors Murderers, Jacqueline Bisset and Gilbert O'Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose trademark look kept long shorts from their rightful place on the fashion pages for so many years.

Adam Mars-Jones is the author of three novels, The Waters of Thirst, Pilcrow and Cedilla, and two collections of short stories, Lantern Lecture and Monopolies of Loss. He is also the author of Blind Bitter Happiness, a book of essays, and Noriko Smiling, a book about Ozu's film Late Spring. He lives in London.

He has written the truth as he saw it, and written it with passion, charm - and self-awareness -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday The book brims with humour and each sentence is a delight to read. It also contains - courtesy of an extended metaphor drawn from Jane Grigson's recipe for cooking salmon in a court-bouillon - one of the best descriptions of sibling rivalry in contemporary literature. Above all, it is a celebration of language, a love shared by father and son alike -- Andrew Wilson Independent There is much that is moving in Mars-Jones's memoir of his father... The writing sings with cleverness and wit -- Claudia FitzHerbert Sunday Telegraph