Hows Your Father

Hows Your Father Description

What goes on behind closed doors? Hows Your Father tells the story of four generations of one Hackney family on a rollercoaster ride of drugs, violence, sickness, infidelity and the redeeming joys of motherhood. "In the fancy carriage with the cut glass panels they slid him with the flowers what was his last journey. Where they all come out of the flats and watched it prancing down Hoxton you couldn't help yourself not to think where his life went now it was all gone. And it hit me then, he weren't never coming back. His greasy old chair over home and a few empties rolled under it my mum must of missed when she tidied up the front room and his baccy tin and his slippers all what was left. Where a part of me understood how the old woman decided to bury him in his blazer with the brass buttons and slacks she got cleaned special for the occasion and a new white shirt and black tie if it meant something to her to look his best in the coffin and the other part of me reckoned what a waste of good money. What happiness with my mum and drink and work and nine kids I thought was the saddest thing where he was too angry or what else was it. Too angry." Rose's book is a tour de force, a sustained piece of brilliant writing...harrowing, funny, heart-breaking and ultimately, despite its bleakness, a celebration of the human spirit." - Shena Mackay, author of Heligoland "Brilliant...I read it with sustained delight and admiration." - Francis Wyndham "Rose Boyt writes with a vivid physical immediacy that can take the breath away. She is an original, with her own strange magic." - The Independent "Boyt's language is poetic; her descriptions are vivid, often painful but always lively." - Publishers Weekly "There's a sensual, pictorial clarity to Ms. Boyt's writing." - The New York Times "In 1976 I saw the streets and the people of Hoxton with the same wide eyes I had fixed on the women in the market in Port O'Spain with their nameless wares, the vultures hovering over the shanty towns and the soldiers stationed on the ramparts of the Polish dock, their guns pointing at me as I was about to leap off the ship onto their frozen country in my night gown, my hair fastened with ribbons in two plaits to stop it from becoming tangled in the sea breezes, because I had woken up in a new place and wanted to explore it." -Rose Boyt