Editions

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 28/07/2016
ISBN: 9781473524606
Length: 432 Pages
RRP: £8.99

Dadland

A Journey into Uncharted Territory

Keggie Carew

The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, winner of the Costa Biography Award

Keggie Carew grew up under the spell of an unorthodox, enigmatic father. An undercover guerrilla agent during the Second World War, in peacetime he lived on his wits and dazzling charm. But these were not always enough to sustain a family.

As his memory began to fail, Keggie embarked on a quest to unravel his story once and for all. Dadland is that journey. It takes us into shadowy corners of history, a madcap English childhood, the poignant breakdown of a family, the corridors of dementia and beyond.

‘OH THIS BOOK. Beautiful and fierce and brave. Memory and war and family and loss and, well, wow’ Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

'A thrilling history of Churchill's Special Operations Executive... combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author’s father' Nick Hornby, Observer

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 28/07/2016
ISBN: 9781473524606
Length: 432 Pages
RRP: £8.99

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Reviews

""As Dad was losing his past... I was trying to retrieve it," Keggie writes... With the publication of this original, moving book, she has succeeded"

Paul Laity, Guardian (Review)
"Compelling and moving from start to finish... Carew’s funny, fascinating and unflinching tribute to her father is a portrait of a complex man: not just a war hero but a flawed husband; not just a Jedburgh but her incorrigible and much-missed dad"

Melissa Harrison, Financial Times
"a thrilling, bloody, educative history of Churchill's Special Operations Executive... combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author’s father"

Nick Hornby, Observer
"A fascinating mix of military history and family memoir studded with photographs… It’s one woman’s attempt to put her father’s role in history on the page, at the same time as his own recollections of it diminish"

Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times (Saturday Review)
"A poignant, inspiring and often comic account of family life and the man known as the T E Lawrence of Burma ... Ripping real-life yarns of double agents, secret messages, illicit assassinations and cyanide pills... the heroics and humour persist to the end"

Richard Benson, Mail on Sunday

Keggie Carew

Keggie Carew has lived in London, West Cork, Barcelona, Texas and New Zealand. Before writing, her career was in contemporary art. She lives near Salisbury. Tom Carew was born in Dublin in 1919. He served in the Jedburgh unit of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. The Times of India called him ‘Lawrence of Burma’ and ‘the Mad Irishman’. He married three times, and had four children. He died in 2009.