In a publishing year packed with brilliant writing, nothing stopped my heart quite like Howard Cunnell's Fathers & Sons. A fragmentary but utterly lucid multigenerational memoir in which the experience of fatherhood and the demands of masculinity are delicately parsed from all possible angles, it stood out for me for the extraordinary quality of Cunnell's prose: glancing, agile, heartsore, preternaturally perceptive and above all, tender. A unique, and uniquely beautiful, book.
Melissa Harrison Author of At Hawthorn Time A moving account of the unpredictable forms of parenthood and childhood across three generations.
Rowan Moore, books of the summer
Observer
Artfully written, a meditation as much as a memoir, the fragments of his life presented with a novelist's eye for detail and language ... images of brightness, of sun and shadow, make a prism of the book. Narrow ideas of what makes a father, what makes a son, are opened out into a rainbow of possibilities.
New Statesman
Dazzlingly beautiful...this is truly heart-stopping writing
Financial Times
It is one of the most good-hearted, big-souled books I've read, a memoir about what it means to be a man, but more importantly what it means to be a parent. I don't cry easily, but I read the final pages through a luminous wash of tears.
Alex Preston
Guardian
This tender yet hard-boiled memoir is a searing exploration of parenting and gender-creation...Cunnell deserves the accolades he will receive for his book's painterly, masculine honesty
Socialist Review
Truly heart-stopping writing: a unique and hard-won perspective unfolded in lucid and unforgettable prose
Financial Times
This spellbinding life force of a memoir... In a little over 200 pages, this book manages to be all kinds of exceptional: an urgent, agonising exploration of fatherhood, masculinity and family and a testament to the power of the written word to reach out to us in dark times. Above all, it is a hymn to the 'shaping axe' of human love: motherly love, sibling love, erotic love and, ultimately, the transcending love of a father for a child, his in all but biology. Fragile as it may sometimes seem, love can conquer a whole sea of strife.
Daily Express
Spell-binding, life force of a memoir . . . For this book is all kinds of exceptional: an urgent, agonising exploration of fatherhood, masculinity and family; a testament to the power of the written word to reach out to us in dark times; and, above all, a hymn to the shaping axe of human love: motherly love, sibling love, erotic love, and ultimately, the transcending love of a father for a child, his in all but biology. And how, fragile as it may sometimes seem, that love can conquer a whole sea of strife.
Caroline Sanderson
The Bookseller
Essential reading. Agonisingly beautiful and honest. One man's uncompromising testament to love.
Sarah Winman, author of When God Was A Rabbit I admire Cunnell's eye, his precise notation of light and water, whether in Mexico or Brixton, and the emotional commitment of his book. There is a resilience here that is on intimate terms with powerlessness.
Adam Mars-Jones Jumping with beautiful compression through decades, handsomely written, honest and deeply moving, Cunnell's remarkable memoir is a work of guts, grit, and love.
Richard House, author of The Kills A riveting work, remarkable and beautifully written, Fathers & Sons takes you to utterly unexpected places.
Chris Salewicz, Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer Cunnell's memoir Father and Sons explores what it is to come from a family, what it is to start one, and what it is to raise one. It explores what we do to each other within that embrace, bad and good, and what we can do better, even while we fail. Cunnell's memoir is cast in light, and water, and bodies. It is a memoir burnished with love and goodwill. It will leave you watching the world differently
Naomi Wood, author of Mrs. Hemingway Howard Cunnell has forged from the most painful of raw materials a modern masterpiece of fiction. . . The lonelieness of a boy who never knew his father, Jason, who in turn became a father to Jay, a boy trapped in the wrong female body. Their journeys are rendered in prose as exquisite as the spaces of sea, sun and freedom Cunnell always chased for salvation and worked so hard to describe, finally finding himself and that redemption in the gift that was denied to him: being a father to a son
Cathi Unsworth, author of Weirdo With Fathers & Sons, Howard Cunnell rips himself apart and reminds us what true artists do with all the mistakes they've ever made. They turn them into art. Dazzling and memorable, here is a strong and moving mosaic depicting the wayward mystery of our souls
Austin Collings, author of The Myth of Brilliant Summers Fathers and Sons is a beautiful, moving, and marvellously honest book. I relished its resolutely masculine point of view, especially on such a subject, and the tenderness and sensuality with which Cunnell depicts child-rearing.
Kate Clanchy, author of Antigona and Me A miracle of a book: sad, wise, strong and hopeful, its depiction of parenthood will stay with me for a long time
Sunjeev Sahota, author of The Year of the Runaways This book tells the story of how family is made. It tells it frankly, unexpectedly and in such a way that both family and expectations are rewritten and renewed. I couldn't put it down. Bold, brave, beautiful - much more than biology. This is life itself.
Jackie Kay, author of Red Dust Road There is so much aching love in this book, such pain and beauty. Behold, and rejoice
Tim Winton, author of Cloudstreet