LexisNexis Skills Series

The writer's craft necessarily involves a sense of creative duality and in author Frederic Raphael's crisp, fluid memoir this process of fashioning a distinct self has rarely been more sharply observed as a young Jewish New Yorker evolves into a traditional English schoolboy. Born in Chicago to an English father and American mother, the young Raphael enjoys a serene infancy in Thirties New York; his outlook at the time summarised by the recollection that, 'confident of my parents' love and protection, I believed that the world was a nice place if you were nice to it'. It's this comfort zone of early memory that inspires the book's title. Abruptly removed from this peaceful existence aged eight, he's sent to boarding school in Sussex, and when the Second World War rages, to Devon, and finally to Charterhouse. As a quasi-American he's at first uncomfortable in England but gradually becomes accustomed to maintaining a permanent sense of dual identity. Plunged into the strict, often suffocating hierarchy of public-school life, years punctuated by Latin declension, games and grammar pass by, an existence that forces him to create a fluid sense of self; later invaluable as a novelist but clearly often painfully forged. With one eye 'jaundiced, one rose-tinted', Raphael looks back on his early life with wit and perspicacity, determined to understand the child that shaped the man. At once engaging and emotionally detached, it's a memoir devoid of vanity and one that paints a vividly compelling picture of an author in the making. (Kirkus UK)