Red, Red Robin
On sale
6th May 2027
Price: £12.99
‘Joins the very front rank of memoirs of post-war Britain’ David Kynaston
‘Fascinating social history’ Clare Chambers
‘Light paints a fantastically vivid picture of the era’ Sunday Times
Alison Light conjures her girlhood growing up in 1950s Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood – from her doll’s house to her teenage diaries, her comics and schoolbooks – she uses her own story to tell a richly textured social history of post-war England: its popular culture and music, its language and humour.
Lyrical and politically astute, in Red, Red Robin one of our most compelling writers evokes a child’s-eye view of the past through the lens of her adult reflections, querying too how we document that past and the nature of memory itself.
‘Fascinating social history’ Clare Chambers
‘Light paints a fantastically vivid picture of the era’ Sunday Times
Alison Light conjures her girlhood growing up in 1950s Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood – from her doll’s house to her teenage diaries, her comics and schoolbooks – she uses her own story to tell a richly textured social history of post-war England: its popular culture and music, its language and humour.
Lyrical and politically astute, in Red, Red Robin one of our most compelling writers evokes a child’s-eye view of the past through the lens of her adult reflections, querying too how we document that past and the nature of memory itself.
Reviews
A winning blend of personal memories, evoked with startling clarity, and fascinating social history. As all the best memoirs do, Red, Red Robin made me reflect on my own upbringing and see the past again through the bewildered eyes of childhood
A beautifully wrought book. Rich in personal, social and cultural detail. Shows us the complexity, strangeness and beauty of an individual life being created in a world still haunted and scarred by war. Honest, moving, optimistic
Disarmingly frank, unfailingly perceptive, and crammed with evocative social and cultural detail, Alison Light's Red, Red Robin joins the very front rank of memoirs of post-war Britain
Light has a talent for capturing the hum of real lives, their contradictions and ambiguities, under the big official narrative of twentieth century history . . . In her parents' lives and her own, she charts the extraordinary changes of the last 50 years, and in her grandparents' she finds the living vestiges of the nineteenth century. Mesmerising
The powerful story of a working-class childhood, woven into richly detailed social history
A social memoir, showing us how an ordinary life is formed at a particular historical moment . . . Moving
For anyone who grew up in the 1950s, Red, Red Robin will be a total joy . . . Light paints a fantastically vivid picture of the era
Painfully honest and often very funny . . . poignant. It is a wonderful summoning of the period and the gendered politics of the time. A beautifully crafted and absorbing account of class, family, childhood, language and what Light calls the 'rough edges' of a life in history