Father and Son: A memoir about family, the past and mortality (Paperback)

[Jonathan Raban] is a master, as he has shown in his legendary travel writing, of summoning place and people with vivid economy . . . Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This . . . is a gorgeous achievement. - Ian McEwan

Blessed with a lyrical, flowing style . . . Raban was noted for his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and flights of the imagination, but also for evocative powers and sardonic humour. He is frequently melancholic and meditative, but his distinct writing is characterised by precision and clarity. - The Irish Times

Father and Son is a fine achievement, a wide-ranging and compelling account with the author's hallmarks of intelligence, erudition, humour and honesty - The Times Literary Supplement

Any book, [Raban] thought, should roam as freely as it likes and this final volume is an illustration of that . . . and that’s what makes his memoir so lively, even when it stares death in the face. - Blake Morrison, The Guardian

Everything that’s matchless about Raban’s work — his hyperacute eye for detail, his powers of synthesis, his mordant sense of humor, his vast reservoirs of knowledge and his love of travel — is there. - Los Angeles Times

Father and Son is a deeply moving career capstone . . . Raban's finest and most moving book . . . It is poignant and crushing . . . I wept. - The Washington Post

Reading his father's wartime letters changed how Jonathan Raban understood their relationship. A stroke changed how he understood himself . . . As full of eloquence as it is free of sentimentality, [this] memoir is a parting gift from a figure of insight and fierce independence... the pages turn quickly because the lines are so raw. - The Wall Street Journal

[Jonathan Raban] was the kind of writer we don't have in quantity . . . It's our luck that he left this lively and bittersweet memoir behind . . . We find ourselves inside the mind of an outraged, indefatigable commentator on life . . . Every writing day, he asked himself two questions: 'What have I lost?' and 'Am I fooling myself?' . . . [The] result of his labors makes the responses clear: a) very little, and b) no. - The New York Times

Blessed with a lyrical flowing style, Jonathan Raban . . . was noted for his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and flights of the imagination, but also for evocative powers and sardonic humour. . . A quixotic and nomadic seafaring writer, Raban was fascinated by the lives of the people he met . . . [In] his posthumous memoir . . . his thought-provoking approach, with trademark whimsy, illustrates his watchful eye. - The Irish Times

Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths . . . The war chapters, which excerpt correspondence between Raban’s parents, are compelling, but it is Raban’s reckoning with his own frailty that carries the emotional weight of the book. - The New Yorker

Jonathan Raban, who died earlier this year, left this memoir almost complete. It tells two stories, artfully braided . . . [and] with Raban’s interpolations, the Anzio pages [about his father] read like a military thriller . . . He was a master of close observation and wry self-deprecation, and had a cameraman’s ability to switch to a wide-angle lens in a heartbeat. - The Spectator

The late travel writer and novelist’s study of his dad . . . offers a beautifully written portrait rather than judgment. - The Observer