Paperboy (Paperback)

The book is fabulous, and I hope it sells forever. Entrancing, funny, deeply moving and wonderfully written. Please read it Upbeat and forgiving...Fowler's South London childhood was deeply weird...but the tone is sunny, and anyone who remembers Mivvis, jamboree bags, streets with no cars, Sid James and vast old Odeons will love this Sixties retro-fest. INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Paper-dry wit and natural charm...brutally funny. LONDON LITE A wonderfully vigorous read, confident in its total recall and acute in its deft definitions of characters. Delightfully written, this funny and engrossing memoir is a wonderful evocation of a Fifties and Sixties childhood CHOICE 'Book of the Month' Paper-dry wit, natural charm, brutally funny anecdotes - Fowler's likeable memoir unearths the trail that led the schoolboy to become a writer LONDON EVENING STANDARD Beautiful, magical and moving DAILY MAIL Humorously recounted, Fowler's passion for reading is framed by an affectionate description of his London childhood, adding colour to a memoir packed with anecdotes FINANCIAL TIMES His book is an almost Morrissey-like lament, with a similar plangent drollery, for a sixties childhood spent in a backwater of Greenwich. Fowler has both a taste and a flair for the lurid. His mother is lovingly evoked in this memoir. The book has a well-rounded narrative arc, incidentally, and the father is redeemed by some closing revelations. Here are the roots of an author who would become romantically committed to the most romantic forms of storytelling. I wonder whether the computer-driven generation will find the same solace and the kind of energy that drives Fowler NEW STATESMAN Written truthfully and bringing towards its conclusion a moving reconciliation. It also contains one of the best encapsulations of what it is to be a writer THE SCOTSMAN If you were born in the suburbs in 1953, this book has your name on it. Actually, it has Christopher Fowler's, but this memoir is exactly right for anyone who wished they had been born in a less embarrassing time, place and family. Even in the direst of family discords, the laughter lurked INDEPENDENT I loved Paperboy. It took me back to Vesta Chow Mein and the dire warnings that reading would 'hurt my eyes'. The fifties and sixties are represented as a golden age in which to grow up. Christopher Fowler reminds us they were not that great!

"Superman", "Dracula", "The Avengers", "Treasure Island"...when you're ten years old, you can fall in love with any story so long as it's a good one. But what if you're growing up in a house without books? Christopher Fowler's memoir captures life in suburban London as it has rarely been seen: through the eyes of a lonely boy who spends his days between the library and the cinema, devouring novels, comics, cereal packets - anything that might reveal a story. But it's 1960, and after fifteen years of post-war belt-tightening, his family is not ready to indulge a child cursed with too much imagination...Caught between an ever-sensible but exhausted mother and a DIY-obsessed father fighting his own demons, Christopher takes refuge in words. His parents try to understand their son's peculiar obsessions, but fast lose patience with him - and each other. The war of nerves escalates to include every member of the Fowler family, and something has to give, but does it mean that a boy must always give up his dreams for the tough lessons of real life? Beautifully written, this rich and astute evocation of a time and a place recalls a childhood at once eccentric and endearingly ordinary.