Alison Light

'Joins the very front rank of memoirs of post-war Britain' DAVID KYNASTON'A winning blend of personal memories, evoked with startling clarity, and fascinating social history' CLARE CHAMBERSIn Red, Red Robin, Alison Light puts herself into history, conjuring her girlhood from the 1950s to the 1970s, growing up in an extended family in Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood - from her doll's house to her infant and teenage diaries, her comics and schoolbooks - she uses her own story to tell a richly-textured social history of post-war England: its popular culture and music, its language and humour. Warm, witty and often moving, Light recalls the all-singing, all-dancing little girl who becomes a grammar-school snob; the street kid turned fashion-conscious teenager, searching for the ideal boy, navigating a rapidly modernising world and a family life equally transformed. Going to university, she asks: what does it mean to leave home - and do we ever truly leav? eautifully crafted and deeply pleasurable, Red, Red Robin is an exploration of the making of an English girl and of her sense of self. It asks whether we can retain a strong attachment to our place of origin - honouring our histories and beliefs - while resisting both nostalgia and disavowal. In this lyrical, analytical and politically astute memoir, one of our most compelling writers evokes a child's eye view of the past through the lens of her adult reflections, querying too how we document that past and the nature of memory itself.

'Remarkable, moving, illuminating. A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read' Spectator Alison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic figure on the British Left, utterly driven by his work and by a commitment to collective politics. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead. Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he from a Jewish Communist family with its roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, she from the English working class. In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. She tells of moving into Raphael's cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which brutally transformed London's old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael's mother. Finally she reflects on the power of mourning and how it shapes a life. Through its frank and touching account of a marriage between two very different people, it celebrates the capacity we all have to share our lives and to change our selves. 'The greatest memoirs give us something more than scenes from a life - they offer all the complex shades and colours that we expect in fiction. A Radical Romance is more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art' Guardian 'Beautifully crafted...It casts a light on the lightness of love and the profound depression of loss. A truly gifted writer' The Herald