Rating: 5 out of 5

Lemn Sissay is the guest director for Brighton Festival this year. When looking through episodes of Elizabeth Day’s “How to fail” podcast last week I found a bonus episode featuring him. So I listened to it. He spoke a lot about his childhood. And Elizabeth spoke quite a lot about this memoir. He was interesting, the way Elizabeth spoke about the book was interesting, and so I thought it might be interesting to read before the Brighton Festival launch event and ticket scrum.

The story of Lemn’s childhood is a tough one. And it’s told through the medium of official documents from social workers, schools etc and then through Lemn’s own recollections and understandings. Sometimes the disparity between the two is unsettling.

A sad but interesting tale told well.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account