My Own Worst Enemy

Robert Edric

From Shelf: Wish list

My Own Worst Enemy is an honest and moving memoirof a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and therelationship between a touchy, overbearing bully of afather and a son whose acceptance to grammar schoolputs him on another track entirely.

'A small masterpiece' The Spectator

My Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely.

With a novelist's eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-men's clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman's place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended - though over all of it hovers the vanity and barely-suppressed anger of his own father.

My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait both of particular time and place - the Sheffield of half a century ago - and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.

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