Take Me Home by Jonathan Taylor
When Jonathan Taylor was eight he began to find his father puzzling. The first thing that happened was that his father couldn't remember Jonathan's sister's name. Then he began to shake, to drive badly, to forget who or where he was, and to mistake his son for someone else entirely. 'Help, help, help, help, help', his father would say, on and on, but there seemed to be no helping him. Doctors diagnosed Parkinson's disease and dementia, and Jonathan gradually became one of his father's carers, taking it in turn with his family to look after him for the next thirteen years. Take Me Home is the story of a son's struggle for recognition from a father who is being transformed mentally and physically by a ruinous disease, and a writer's search to discover a father's strange and largely secret past - who he was before he became a disappointed headmaster in Stoke-on-Trent and, at the last, a trembling Parkinsonian who sometimes mistook his son for Humphrey Bogart or a giraffe.
Very moving and beautifully written -- John Bayley
A brave and unsentimental book -- Diana Athill
Taylor..is a spirited writer, blessed with an unusually keen sense of curiosity * Guardian *
Taylor's account... turns its back on the clichés of the genre to which it seems initially to belong...Instead, there is black comedy to be extracted from the story....Taylor's willingness to acknowledge this makes all the more poignant his attempts to reconstruct the father lost beneath the disease * Sunday Times *
...affecting and erudite memoir...startlingly acute * Irish Times *
....achieves a heartfelt yet unsentimental memoir that is also a reconciliation * Times Literary Supplement *
A brave and unsentimental book -- Diana Athill
Taylor..is a spirited writer, blessed with an unusually keen sense of curiosity * Guardian *
Taylor's account... turns its back on the clichés of the genre to which it seems initially to belong...Instead, there is black comedy to be extracted from the story....Taylor's willingness to acknowledge this makes all the more poignant his attempts to reconstruct the father lost beneath the disease * Sunday Times *
...affecting and erudite memoir...startlingly acute * Irish Times *
....achieves a heartfelt yet unsentimental memoir that is also a reconciliation * Times Literary Supplement *
Jonathan Taylor is author of the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007). He is also Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, and co-director of arts organisation and small publisher Crystal Clear Creators. His articles, stories, poems and reviews have appeared in newspapers and magazines including Times Literary Supplement, Guardian Family, Times Higher, Times 2 and many others. He is the author of the books Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing. He is currently completing a novel, Entertaining Strangers.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781862079557 |
| ISBN 10 | 1862079552 |
| Title | Take Me Home |
| Author | Jonathan Taylor |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Granta Books |
| Year published | 2007-07-02 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |