Father and Son

[Jonathan Raban] is a master, as he has shown in his legendary travel writing, of summoning place and people with vivid economy … Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This … is a gorgeous achievement – Ian McEwan
Blessed with a lyrical, flowing style … Raban was noted for his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and flights of the imagination, but also for evocative powers and sardonic humour … He is frequently melancholic and meditative, but his distinct writing is characterised by precision and clarity * Irish Times *
Father and Son is a fine achievement, a wide-ranging and compelling account with the author’s hallmarks of intelligence, erudition, humour and honesty * Times Literary Supplement *
Any book, [Raban] thought, should roam as freely as it likes and this final volume is an illustration of that … and that’s what makes his memoir so lively, even when it stares death in the face – Blake Morrison * Guardian *
Everything that’s matchless about Raban’s work — his hyperacute eye for detail, his powers of synthesis, his mordant sense of humor, his vast reservoirs of knowledge and his love of travel — is there * Los Angeles Times *
Father and Son is a deeply moving career capstone … Raban’s finest and most moving book … It is poignant and crushing … I wept * The Washington Post *
Reading his father’s wartime letters changed how Jonathan Raban understood their relationship. A stroke changed how he understood himself … As full of eloquence as it is free of sentimentality, [this] memoir is a parting gift from a figure of insight and fierce independence… the pages turn quickly because the lines are so raw * The Wall Street Journal *
[Jonathan Raban] was the kind of writer we don’t have in quantity … an outraged, indefatigable commentator on life … Every writing day, he asked himself two questions: ‘What have I lost?’ and ‘Am I fooling myself?’ … [The] result of his labors makes the responses clear: a) very little, and b) no * The New York Times *
Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths … The war chapters, which excerpt correspondence between Raban’s parents, are compelling, but it is Raban’s reckoning with his own frailty that carries the emotional weight of the book * The New Yorker *
Jonathan Raban, who died earlier this year, left this memoir almost complete. It tells two stories, artfully braided … [and] with Raban’s interpolations, the Anzio pages [about his father] read like a military thriller … He was a master of close observation and wry self-deprecation, and had a cameraman’s ability to switch to a wide-angle lens in a heartbeat * The Spectator *
The late travel writer and novelist’s study of his dad … offers a beautifully written portrait rather than judgment * The Observer *
[Raban’s] keen observational eye, wry sense of humor, and brilliant ability to prise apart the nonsense and find the tiny seed of truth at the heart of any situation were unique among his peers – Paul Constant * Seattle Times *

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. His awards included 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.

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