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  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409059141
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

Stuff

A Memoir of Death and Life




A superlative memoir, the equal of Richard Wollheim's Germs or Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?

A few months after two of his parents had died, Martin Rowson had a dream about the house he grew up in which was crammed with tons and tons of stuff, both physical and emotional. In this book Rowson delves into all that 'stuff'; weaving together dreams, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, advice, history, smells, sounds and sights of the past. The result is a funny, thought-provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease and the existentialist horrors of clearing out the attic.

  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409059141
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

About the author

Martin Rowson

Martin Rowson is an award-winning political cartoonist whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mirror, the Scotsman, Tribune, Index on Censorship and Granta. His previous publications include comic-book adaptations of The Waste Land and Tristram Shandy, as well as Gimson's Kings & Queens by Andrew Gimson. His first novel, Snatches, was published by Cape in 2006.

Also by Martin Rowson

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Praise for Stuff

Martin Roswson's Stuff may actually be a work of genius... what really astonishes is the strange, robust gravity of the style, combined with an effortless talent for scenic arrangement that manages to fit innumerable disparate incidents into a wholly original shape... a genuinely mature work of commemoration and love, one always attentive to the nuance and texture of things

Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

Absorbing and vivid.... the best and most touching element of Stuff is that, unlike so many memoirs concerning parents, it emphatically delivers... It is a lively and entertaining book, yet its earnest concern, in the end, is to examine what truly remains of the dead we have loved, and to face up to all the sorting

Lynn Truss, Sunday Times

Martin Rowson is one of the most viscerally distinctive and critically acclaimed cartoonists working in Britain today....Stuff is a rich and profoundly sensitive book

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

A wonderful evocation of what it was like to grow up in the Sixties and Seventies. The writing is never less than pin-sharp...deeply moving

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

Stuff is a candid, sanguine, often very amusing, illustration of a serious point of view

Ruth Scurr, Daily Telegraph

Frequently touching without being mawkish, Stuff is a surprisingly life-affirming read and, despite the emotive subjects being covered, often a very funny one, too

New Statesman

Stuff is a moving, funny and stylish account of how to hang on to the bits you really need

Irish Times

He is a sensitive writer, capable of great subtlety and nuanced emotional gear-changes

William Leith, Guardian

Hypnotically readable, this wonderful book is like exploring an attic packed with fascinating odds and ends... Highly evocative, oddly moving, and includes some marvellous trivia

Sunday Times