In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love - Rilegato

Seymour, Miranda

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0743268679 ISBN 13: 9780743268677

Casa editrice: Simon & Schuster, 2008

Riassunto

'Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,' wrote George Seymour in 1944, when he was aged twenty-one. But the object of his affection was not a young woman, but a house -- ownership of which was then a distant dream. But he did eventually acquire Thrumpton, a beautiful country house in Nottinghamshire, and it was in this idyllic home that Miranda Seymour grew up. But her upbringing was far from idyllic, as life revolved around her father's capriciousness. The House took priority, and everything -- everyone -- else was secondary. Until, that is, the day late on in his life when George Seymour took to riding powerful motorbikes around the countryside clad in black leather in the company of a young male friend. Had he taken leave of his senses? Or finally found them? And how did this sea-change affect his wife and daughter? Both biography and family memoir, IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE is a riveting and ultimately shocking portrait of desire both overt and suppressed, and the devastating consequences of misplaced love.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

‘Utterly riveting, ruthlessly honest and strangely touching, this portrait of the author’s extraordinary father both appalled and moved me – and made me laugh out loud’
Deborah Moggach
‘A brilliantly crafted true story, In My Father’s House gains depth and complexity from its willingness to explore the ethical dilemma of revealing painful family secrets. There is more to learn about human nature in this short memoir than in many novels two or three times its length’
Pat Barker
'This is an extraordinary book. Miranda Seymour has written a family memoir whose honesty appals even as it compels, but its secondary achievement is to draw, almost from the corner of its eye, a portrait of Englishness in the last century that encompasses class, ownership, landscape, money, manners and clothes. It is consistently fascinating and occasionally horrifying and will make a good deal of modern autobiography look feeble and colourless in comparison'
Observer 12/2

'In My Father's House is unsparing, shocking as often as comic, the story cunningly constructed and beautifully told'
Independent 9/2

'The only flaw in this bizarre and fascinating tale is that it speeds by too quickly. In My Father's House is disarming in its honesty, endlessly surprising and oddly touching'
The Spectator 17/2

'Seymour works heroically through her painful feelings, some still unresolved, about her capriciously selfish father, her stoic mother and her love for the house she inherited'
The Times 17/2

'By turns shocking, funny, tragic and moving, it deserves to take its place among the country-house classics'
Country Life Feb '07

'In terms of review coverage, however, the literary sections focused on Miranda Seymour's "intimate memoir" In My Father's House, which elicited praise from most critics’
The Bookseller 9/2
'This is an intimate journey through the life of a family that suffered as a consequence of George's passion, fears and capricious behaviour; the cost of his passion was paid by many. Often dark, like its main subject, this is a fascinating and beautifully written study of love and obsession'
Waterstones Books Quarterly, Feb '07

'Seymour writes captivatingly about growing up in a grand country house and her surprise when, late in life, her father starts riding around on big motorbikes with leather-clad young men. Shocking and touching'
Gay Times, March ‘07

'Fascinating'
Alan Judd, Motoring column, The Spectator 24/2
‘An intimate journey through the life of a family that suffered as a consequence of George’s passion, fears and capricious behaviour; the cost of his passion was paid by many. Often dark, like its main subject, this is a fascinating and beautifully written study of love and obsession’
Waterstones Book Quarterly April issue
‘Miranda Seymour has written an odd tale of cankered love... Every sad, unflinching, carefully structured chapter of In My Father’s House includes [her] dialogues with her splendid mother... It is disarmingly honest of Miranda Seymour to include this sane, tart, sceptical voice intoning “your generation never understand”’
'This is an intimate journey through the life of a family that suffered as a consequence of George's passion, fears and capricious behaviour; the cost of his passion was paid by many. Often dark, like its main subject, this is a fascinating and beautifully written study of love and obsession'
Waterstones Books Quarterly, Feb '07

'Seymour writes captivatingly about growing up in a grand country house and her surprise when, late in life, her father starts riding around on big motorbikes with leather-clad young men. Shocking and touching'
Gay Times, March ‘07
'Fascinating'
Alan Judd, Motoring column, The Spectator 24/2
‘A candid, amusing and often traumatic look at the novelist's family, in particular her relationship with her father’ Summer Reading Daily Telegraph 21/7
'An extraordinary memoir, cleverly structured and painfully honest: utterly different from the ghost-written effluent pumped out by publishers under the heading 'misery lit''
Adam Sisman, Books of the Year Sunday Telegraph 25/11
'Bizarre, gripping memoir about [Seymour's] gay dad and his obsessive love for a grand house and bad biker called Robbie. It's genius!'
Rachel Cooke, Books of the Year New Statesman 26/11
'Her story of her gay father and his particular attachment to his house'
Sunday Times, Christmas Books Memoirs 2/12
'I can recommend with much enthusiasm... In My Father's House, a memoir that reads like a fairy tale gone wrong'
Joyce Carol Oates, Books Of The Year TLS 30/11
'Conventional biography is going through an awkward patch. After the misery memoir, what? I enjoyed but was appalled by Miranda Seymour's In My Father's House'
James Fergusson, Books of the Year TLS 30/11
'An extraordinary memoir, cleverly structured and painfully honest: utterly different from the ghost-written effluent pumped out by publishers under the heading 'misery lit''
Adam Sisman, Sunday Telegraph 25/11
'He was a country squire with a stately home. But then Miranda Seymour's father turned into a ruthlessly selfish leather-clad biker - with a bizarre passion for young men.... My Dastardly Daddy'
Interview and Book Club Choice, Weekend magazine, Daily Mail 5/1
'Something happened to Miranda Seymour's snobbish, captious and tyrannical father when he was a child; starting perhaps with being left behind while his own diplomat father was abroad. Anyway, he fell I love with his uncle's Nottingshire mansion, Thrumpton, and eventually acquired it. Most human relations meant little to him; the house was all, more important even than his unfortunate wife or later his boyfriend. Here, in a splendidly written memoir, his daughter finally gets him out of her system. What hell he'd been to live with!'
Sunday Telegraph 6/1
'Our extraordinary Book Club choice for January, is a story of obsessive love: that of a man for a house. Acclaimed biographer Miranda Seymour turns her attention to a subject close to her home: her father George FitzRoy Seymour and his fixation with Thrumpton Hall, his large and forbidding Jacobean country manor. Utterly riveting and unusual, this is a deeply personal insight into a private family, and a true English eccentric'
Daily Mail 11/1

'Fascinating'
Sunday Times 13/1

'A brave and revealing book that helps us to re-consider the price of privilege, and the lives of people "bred to sound bored"'
The Times 12/1

'Quite the most stunning memoir about family life I have read in a long time. Finely observed, cleverly constructed and beautifully written. It is both shocking and poignant in its description of a father who is obsessed by a beautiful house to the detriment of everything else, including his family. As if this were not enough, he then has a mid-life crisis which finds him riding powerful motorbikes around the countryside clad in black leathers, in the company of a young male friend. Ruthlessly honest, as sad as it is funny'
WHAT BOOK? .... Are You Reading Now? by Clare Francis (Macmillan author) Daily Mail 18/1

'By turns witty, wicked and sad... Seymour's moving narrative is also about the difficulties of 'prowling back into the recesses of the past' to expel ghosts, even in the knowledge that some footsteps will always haunt the present'
Observer 13/1

'A gripping mix of cool investigation and vengeful condemnation'
Evening Standard 8/1
'A mesmerising, quintessentially English story'
Mail on Sunday 24/2
'A mesmerising, quintessentially English story'
Mail on Sunday 24/3

L'autore:

Miranda Seymour, author of the award-winning In My Father's House has written many acclaimed novels and biographies, including lives of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Ottoline Morrell and Helle Nice, the Bugatti Queen.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Simon & Schuster
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0743268679
• ISBN 13: 9780743268677
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 320