Father and Son
'A beautiful, compelling memoir . . . This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement" – Ian McEwan
On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his own mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the extraordinary story of his parents’ marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.
Jonathan Raban engages profoundly and candidly with some of the biggest questions at the heart of what it means to be alive, laying bare the human capacity to withstand trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humour that persist despite it. Father and Son, the final work from the peerless man of letters, is a tremendous, continent-sweeping story of love and resilience in the face of immense loss.
Jonathan Raban was the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. Over the span of six decades, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines.
In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he lived with his daughter until his death in 2023.