Red, Red Robin
My Long Goodbye to Home
$47.64
- Hardcover
336 pages
- Release Date
18 August 2026
Summary
In Red, Red Robin, Light puts herself into history, conjuring her girlhood from the 1950s to the 1970s, growing up in an extended family in Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood - from her doll’s house to her infant and 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.
Warm, w…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781474619912 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1474619916 |
| Author: | Alison Light |
| Publisher: | Orion Publishing Co |
| Imprint: | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 336 |
| Release Date: | 18 August 2026 |
| Weight: | 544g |
| Dimensions: | 240mm x 156mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
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 – DAVID KYNASTON
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 – CLARE CHAMBERS, author of SMALL PLEASURES
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 – DAVID ALMOND
About The Author
Alison Light
Alison Light is a writer and critic. Her book A Radical Romance won the PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. Her other books include the much-acclaimed Mrs Woolf and the Servants and Common People: The History of an English Family, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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