An astonishing, devastating memoir of a 1930s American childhood. A New York Times Best Book of 2001

Born in the 1920s to young, bohemian parents, Paula Fox was left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage. Rescued by her grandmother, Fox eventually landed with a gentle, poor minister in upstate New York. Uncle Elwood, as he came to be known, gave Paula a secure and loving home for many years, but her parents constantly re-surface. Her father is a good-looking, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter (among his credits is The Last Train to Madrid, which Graham Greene declared was 'the worst movie I ever saw'), and her mother, icily glamorous, is given to almost psychotic bursts of temper that punctuate a deep, disturbing indifference. They exercise, probably without even realising it, a sort of drip-drip cruelty, a cruelty by stealth, upon Paula, as they shuttle her from one exotic place to another, from a Cuban sugar plantation to Hollywood to Montreal to Florida, from relative to relative, never spending more than a few moments with her, maybe 2 days, maybe 2 weeks, before they leave her and move on.

Paula Fox has a voice of great clarity and simplicity and this is an incredibly powerful, straight-to-the-heart piece of writing.

A novelist and children's writer, her adult fiction is currently undergoing a resurrection in the US, admired and lauded by Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Andrea Barrett, to name but a few, who claim a place for her alongside Updike, Roth & Bellow. Several of her novels, including the most famous, Desperate Characters, a piercing portrait of a Sixties NY couple, are spectacularly back in print in the US, and Ms Fox is being rightly appreciated once again.

Offers the same reading experience as Bad Blood - readable, honest, beautifully written, quietly devastating.