Letter to My Daughter (Paperback, New edition)

"Letter to my Daughter" is an enchanting book about growing up and remembering the vanished scenes of childhood. In a letter to his then 17-year-old daughter Jessica, Graham Little draws an intimate portrait of himself as a small boy in Northern Ireland in the 1940s. The pleasures and traumas of domestic life, seen through the eyes of a child, are portrayed with unforgettable vividness.

Graham Little's story is also about migrating. In 1948, when he was nine, his family moved to England. Then he encountered the glamour of his grandfather's club in the West End, pea-soup fogs, and postwar prep schools that taught spelling as a political virtue. But his father was soon looking for another fresh start, and the 15-year-old boy found himself playing deck-tennis and falling in love on a P&O liner steaming to Australia, where he would learn the manners of a new country.

Written in an under-stated and yet deeply evocative prose, "Letter to my Daughter" reclaims a lost world and makes it our world, too.