Description

‘A small masterpiece’ The Spectator

My 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-men’s clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman’s place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended – 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 – the Sheffield of half a century ago – and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.

Publisher Review

'Held me rapt ... Edric's hyper-precise detailing of his working class Sheffield childhood and appalling father is utterly compelling and deserves many a prize' - Patrick Gale Praise for Robert Edric 'Edric's novels constitute one of the most astonishing bodies of work to appear from a single author for a generation' - Daily Telegraph 'Much contemporary fiction seems inconsequential and fleeting by comparison' - Guardian 'Edric is a novelist who makes his own rules and can't be compared with anyone else' - The Times