Two Sisters

Blake Morrison

Blue Door GB

From the daughter of the bestselling author of Father Joe: the poignant and ultimately hopeful memoir of a young girl’s struggle to live a normal childhood in the chaotic seventies, and to overcome sexual abuse by her famous father Earlier this year, Tony Hendra’s memoir, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The book detailed his life as a comedian who launched the careers of John Belushi and Chevy Chase and helped create such cult classics as This Is Spinal Tap, while he struggled with inner demons including alcohol and drug abuse. But there was a glaring omission in his supposed tell-all confessional: his sexual abuse of his daughter, Jessica Hendra, when she was a young girl.
 After more than thirty years of silence, Hendra has decided to reveal the truth. In this poignant memoir, she reveals the full story behind the New York Times article that rocked the world and detailed her father’s crimes. But Jessica’s story is no footnote to her father’s story. No One Was Listening is also the inspiring story of her own journey, and how she was finally able to find healing within, after years of struggling with anorexia, bulimia, and low self-esteem. Set against the backdrop of the chaotic seventies, Hendra’s memoir follows Jessica and her sister Kathy as they strove to make a normal life for themselves amidst the madness, sex, and drug abuse that her parents and their friends―many of the household names in the world of show business―participated in. No One Was Listening reveals the hope and heartache of a young girl who was faced with a loss of innocence at an early age, who faced a slow and painful recovery, and who finally found contentment and peace within.

How to Cook Your Daughter: A Memoir

Hendra, Jessica

Humor & Entertainment

Harper

Around 1400, in the city of Mainz, a man was born whose heretical invention was to change history. Sixty odd years later he died - robbed of his business, his printing presses, and, so he thought, his immortality. Johann Gutenberg, master printer, charmer, conman and visionary was the man who invented 'artificial writing' and printed the Gutenberg Bible.In his dazzling first novel Morrison gives us Gutenberg's 'testament' - his justification, dictated to one of the young scribes his invention has put out of work. Through the words of his endearing, exasperating creation Morrison conjures up the colourful, plague-ridden world of fifteenth-century Europe, the rich burghers, concupiscent daughters, wily apprentices, careless scribes - and the craftsmen who pioneered the art of print. But, above all, there is the exasperating, endearing and finally haunting figure of Gutenberg himself- a man who gambled everything - money, honour, friendship and a woman's love - on the greatest invention of the last millennium.

The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Random House]

In his masterpiece of family literature, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?", Blake Morrison's mother appears as an intriguing but mostly silent figure. This is her startling and touching story - and a son's search to discover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself again to adapt to a quieter post-war family life. At the heart of the book, there's a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny, furious letters his parents wrote during their courtship. It evokes a surprising picture of life and love in WWII. "Things my Mother Never Told Me" is a revealing and poignant anatomy of family conflict, love, war and finally marriage. Kim Morrison emerges quietly, magically form the shadows, a determined heroine for our times.

Things My Mother Never Told Me

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Vintage Books USA

Set over a long weekend in East Anglia, this is the chilling story of a rivalrous friendship - as told with deceptive casualness by the narrator, Ian. It opens with a surprise phone call from an old university friend, inviting Ian and his wife, Em, for a few days by the sea. Their hosts, Ollie and Daisy, are a golden couple, and the scene is set for sunlit relaxation.   But dangerous tensions quickly emerge, and in the stifling atmosphere of a remote cottage in the hottest days of summer, Ollie and Ian resurrect a bet made twenty years before. Each day becomes a series of challenges for higher and higher stakes, setting in train actions that will have irreversible consequences.

Last Weekend

Contemporary

Vintage Books

The Last Weekend [paperback] Blake Morrison [Jan 01, 2012] ... 0099581965

The Last Weekend

Literary

Vintage

Already a bestseller in England, Morrison's memoir of his father's life and death is both moving and intelligent. His subject is the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, competent and inept, charming and infuriating, strong and terribly vulnerable. A classic of family literature.--The Spectator.

And when did you last see your father

Picador USA

Penguin Modern Poets 1: Volume One: James Fenton, Kit Wright, Blake Morrison Bk. 1

Penguin Modern Poets: James Fenton, Kit Wright, Blake Morrison Bk. 1

JAMES FENTON

Kit Wright

Poetry

Penguin

This volume seeks to expose the hollowness of condemnation divorced from understanding in relation to the Bulger murder trial. People have almost become desensitized to random murder. It is often explained away by madness, sexual fantasy or rejection. One murder in recent times reduced every person to silence: the abduction and beating to death of a helpless infant by two ten-year-old boys. How and why did two innocent boys kill another? Is childhood innocence a myth? And what punishment could fit such a crime, assuming that children are fit to stand trial for murder? Blake Morrison went to the trial in Preston, and discovered a sad ritual of condemnation with two bewildered children at the centre. He looked for possible explanations in the boys' families, their dreary environment, their fantasies, their exposure to violent films. He evokes the worst feats of parents through candid and raw memories of his relations with his own children, and delves into his own childhood to reveal the worst thing he has ever done, to show how easy it is to go along with cruelty. Blake Morrison is the author of two collections of poetry, "Dark Glasses" and "The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper", and is co-editor of "The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry". His memoir, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" won the Waterstone's/Esquire Award for non-fiction and the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1993.

As If

Granta Books

This is Blake Morrison's memoir of his father, Dr Arthur Morrison. It shows a son asking who his father really was. Was he the man seen through a seven-year-old's eyes, jumping queues, or the sexual charmer seen by a 17-year-old? Or was he the figure, so hard to recognize, on his death-bed?

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

History & Criticism

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Books by Blake Morrison