Swimming with My Father - Hardcover

Jeal, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571221009 ISBN 13: 9780571221004

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2004

Synopsis

Swimming with My Father is a piercingly honest account of growing up in the convention-bound 1950s. Tim Jeal spent his childhood torn between a worldly mother and a father who was a Christian mystic, conscientious objector, and devoted swimmer of England's rivers. From his own embarrassing schoolboy meeting with T. S. Eliot, to his father's rapt involvement with the natural world, this beautifully nuanced memoir is by turns lyrical, poignant and gloriously funny. Part tribute to a remarkable man, part portrait of a vanished Britain, its underlying theme is what makes us who we are and how time can shift the roles of child and parent. At once understated and illuminating, Tim Jeal's exploration of the past evokes those universal feelings of love and anguish that make us most human.

About this title

Review:

"Quite wonderful. I hope it becomes a classic: it deserves to be. It really is very, very good." -- Melvyn Bragg

'A gem - beautifully written and astonishingly moving.' -- Virginia Ironside

'A pleasure to read: unpretentious, moving, full of jokes but also unobtrusively wise.' -- Sunday Telegraph

'Terribly moving and terribly funny, often at the same time . . . A hugely enjoyable read.' -- Lynn Barber

'There are tears, laughter and filial tenderness on every page . . . exquisitely written and wonderfully readable.' -- Daily Mail

'This small, subtle memoir is better stocked with love, humour, sympathy and understanding than a shelf-full of celebrity-stuffed ego-fests.' -- Mail on Sunday

'[Jeal] brings to life a classic English eccentric.' -- New Statesman

About the Author:

Tim Jeal is an acclaimed novelist and biographer, whose Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer was published by Faber in 2007 and was a BBC Radio Four ‘Book of the Week’. Stanley was named Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and, in the US, won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Biography for 2007. Tim’s memoir Swimming with my Father was published by Faber in 2004 and was also a BBC Radio Four ‘Book of the Week’ and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for autobiography. In September 2011 Faber will publish Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure, which, thanks to much original research, will shed fascinating new light on the 'Search for the Nile' and its colonial consequences. In 1973 Tim Jeal’s Livingstone (1973) was selected as a ‘Notable Book of the Year’ by the New York Times Book Review and one of the ‘Best and Brightest of the Year’ by the Washington Post Book World. Livingstone formed the basis for a BBC TV documentary and a film for the Discovery Channel. It has never been out of print. Nor has Tim Jeal’s Baden-Powell (1989), which was a ‘Notable Book of the Year’, and was chosen by Channel 4 for its ‘Secret Lives’ strand. In 1975 Tim was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0571221009
• ISBN 13: 9780571221004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208