As a young man, Will Boast’s life was scarred by loss. First, his mother died, cruelly destroyed by a brain tumour. Next, his brother was killed in a car crash. By the time his father succumbed to a ruptured ulcer, the author felt his family’s story had ended. “It was just me left, some kind of tacked-on epilogue that went pointlessly on and on.”
As the existence of this memoir proves, however, there were surprising new chapters to come. Alone in the American midwest, where he moved with his English parents as a child, Boast discovers the secrets his father left behind in his homeland: a first marriage, two half-brothers, the quietly repressed stuff of family lore. Negotiating cups of tea and University Challenge in Southampton and grape-juice-stained shagpile and frozen winters in Wisconsin, Boast struggles to find his place in the world and in his family. Even deep into his book’s final revisions, further revelations come to light, and as he crosses out things he previously held as certainties, it’s reassuring to see how hard it is to place that final full stop on a human life.
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