Family Romance

The author of The Debt to Pleasure digs into his family's extraordinary past in a memoir as enthralling as his finest fiction

It was only when his mother died that John Lanchester realized how little he really knew about his parents. With the cache of letters and papers she left behind, he set out to reconstruct just who his parents had been. In doing so, he did much more than trace the remarkable story of a reluctant international banker, a secretive former nun, and the life they shared; he also gained extraordinary insight into his own nature and a deeper understanding of the universal push-pull of family love-and family loss. Part detective work, part evocation of character, this is, above all, compelling storytelling."Family Romance seems almost to stand still amid the bustling traffic of contemporary memoirs."
-John Perry, San Francisco Chronicle

"Of the many books on the strange shelf of family histories, Family Romance is one of the best I've read, for its sleuthing and its subtlety, its revelation of family passions and oddities, and most of all, family secrets and multiple identities. . . . A marvelous book."
-Paul TherouxJohn Lanchester is the author of The Debt to Pleasure (winner of the Whitbread and Hawthornden prizes) and Mr. Phillips. Raised in Hong Kong, he now lives in London with his wife and sons.