My Father's Fortune - by Michael Frayn (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>For the first time, novelist and playwright Frayn, the "master of what is seriously funny," (Anthony Burgess) turns his humor and narrative genius on his own family's story, to re-create the world that made him who he is.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize</b> <p/>Award-winning playwright and novelist Michael Frayn makes the family memoir his own (<i>The Daily Telegraph</i>) as he tells the story of his father, Tom Frayn. A clever lad, an asbestos salesman with a winning smile and a racetrack vocabulary, Tom Frayn emerged undaunted from a childhood spent in two rooms with six other people, all of them deaf. And undaunted he stayed, through German rockets, feckless in-laws, and his own increasing deafness; through the setback of a son as bafflingly slow-witted as the father was quick on his feet; through the shockingly sudden tragedy that darkened his life. As Peter Kemp wrote in <i>The Sunday Times</i> (London), Frayn has never written with more searching brilliance than in his quest for his past.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>"Compelling... Beautiful writing... With a dramatist's sure touch, Frayn introduces a ticking hand grenade on page 107 that may have you saying to yourself: 'Oh. My. God.'" --<i>The New York Times Book Review</i> <p/>"What a lovely tribute... Funny when it needs to be, touching when it needs to be, and cast in smooth, beguiling prose." --<i>Washington Post</i> <p/>"Beautifully rendered and seriously funny." --<i>Boston Globe</i> <p/>"A beautifully written portrait of a vanished way of life and a fondly humorous, very affecting work of homage and love." --<i>Salon</i> <p/>"A wry, unsentimental, but deeply felt family history... The narrative turns wistful as it surveys the gulf--of temperament, circumstance, and class--that opens between father and son as the author pursues an academic and literary life." --<i>The New Yorker</i> <p/>"Endearing... Part of the fortune of the book's title is the gift of storytelling. It is because of this inheritance that we have Frayn's brilliant body of work--which now, thankfully, includes this accomplished memoir." --<i>Time Out New York</i> <p/>"Engrossing... This finely detailed remembrance displays subtle wit and powers of perception that magnify every nook and cranny of ordinary life into something extraordinary." --<i>Kirkus Reviews</i> <p/>"Exquisitely written... Frayn's thoughtful, obsessive, darkly funny exegesis of his father's life is a heroic recreation of a vanished world." --<i>Maclean's (Canada)</i> <p/>"After the brilliant plays--both comic and cerebral--and the subtle novels, one of our best contemporary writers has made the family memoir his own. Not a line, still less a thought, is stale or predictable." --<i>The Daily Telegraph (UK)</i> <p/>"Genuinely delving, yet decently guarded, <i>My Father's Fortune</i> is often very funny and soaked in a wistful sort of melancholy that deepens into a compelling sadness. Frayn has written books that make a bigger bang, but none that is so touching." --<i>The Guardian (UK)</i> <p/>"Ranging from comic star turns to passages of piercingly lucid melancholy, <i>My Father's Fortune</i> adroitly modulates between humor and tragedy, ruefulness and celebration, intellectual keenness and elegiac depths of feeling. A writer who has long been one of our most engrossingly inquiring minds, Frayn has never written with more searching brilliance than in this quest for his past." --<i>The Sunday Times (UK)</i> <p/>"Frayn at his very best." --<i>The Observer (UK)</i> <p/>"Often funny, sometimes painful, but always exquisitely well written, <i>My Father's Fortune</i> reveals the extraordinariness that can lurk in even the most ordinary of lives." --<i>The Sunday Telegraph (UK)</i> <p/>"Entrancing... Forever alert to the inner processes of art and mind, Frayn from time to time nips backstage to show how the memoir machinery works. Yet this keen self-awareness never compromises the deep poignancy--and the rich comedy--of the story he has to tell. As always, that's part of the trick of it for Frayn." --<i>The Independent (UK)</i></p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><p>Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the best-selling <i>Headlong</i>, which was a <i>New York Times</i> Editors' Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and <i>Spies</i>, which received the Whitbread Fiction Award. Michael Frayn is also the author of <i>My Father's Fortune: A Life</i>, <i>The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe</i>, <i>Democracy: A Play</i>, <i>A Landing on the Sun: A Novel</i>, <i>The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue</i> and <i>The Trick of It: A Novel</i><i>.</i> He has also written fifteen plays, among them <i>Noises Off</i> and <i>Copenhagen</i>, which won three Tony Awards in 1999. He lives just south of London.</p>
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