Maggie & Me - Tapa blanda

Shocking and funny in equal measure, and will have you weeping with laughter and sorrow (Katy Guest Independent on Sunday)

The wonderful story of a remarkable man, Maggie & Me is heartbreaking and heartwarming. As gripping as a thriller, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching, this book will resonate long after you finish it. A triumph (SJ Watson, author of Before I Go to Sleep)

Out of poverty, brutality and prejudice, Damian Barr builds something riveting, touching and painfully funny. His account of growing up under Thatcher's regime defines the experience of a generation. At once personal and universal, Maggie & Me is a work of stealthy genius (Maggie O’Farrell)

A marvellous memoir - wrenching, funny and wise. I loved it! (Joanne Harris)

This amazing book tells the story of an appalling childhood with truth and clarity unsmudged by self-pity. It grips from beginning to end and leaves the reader elated at the fact that such experiences can be overcome and produce a man who can write a book so vivid, so unsentimentally forgiving, and so memorable (Diana Athill)

This book will break your heart and make you angry; then it will lift your heart and make you glad; because Damian Barr has transmuted a grim childhood into a work of art and brought forth beauty from ashes (Richard Holloway)

That Damian Barr survived his childhood is testament to his startling courage and determination.That he was then able to write about the experience with such wit, verve and candour is equally astonishing. Maggie & Me is a cause for celebration on all kinds of levels. Rejoice! (Rupert Thomson)

Damian Barr sifts through the wreckage of a horrific childhood and manages to extract humour, generosity of spirit and ultimately joy, and he does it with a literary élan that had me re-reading whole paragraphs, just for the pleasure of it.

To say I loved it doesn't begin to convey the mixture of emotions - tears, laughter, anger - I felt while reading it. This book should be required reading for children who need to know that there is life beyond an appalling beginning, and for politicians who prefer to look the other way

(Jojo Moyes author of Me Before You)

Like all too few memoirs, in a bloated, me-me age, Maggie & Me ends all too soon. Imagine one of the sharper Mitford sisters cruelly reborn into the family from Shameless and you've an idea of the treat in store. Barr tells his engaging, sad-funny story of a camp, bright lad in dire circumstances in Thatcher-era Motherwell in such a beguilingly confiding, arm-linking style, that I felt I'd made a new best friend only to lose them to a world of glittering opportunities. Read this at once before someone films it, as they most surely will (Patrick Gale)

This is the most vital, visceral memoir since Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? . Barr's depiction is so pungent, so earth-shattering it's a universal story of alienation - one for anyone who's ever felt desperate to escape. His childhood, evoked with such cheek-biting tenderness, now seems more real and more Technicolor than my own. I won't be happy until everyone reads this book (Patrick Strudwick)