My Own Worst Enemy

'A small masterpiece' The SpectatorMy Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely. With a novelist's eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-menxe2x80x99s clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a womanxe2x80x99s place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended xe2x80x93 though over all of it hovers the vanity and barely-suppressed anger of his own father. My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait both of particular time and place xe2x80x93 the Sheffield of half a century ago xe2x80x93 and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.