The Children of Lovers, By Judy Golding

Our father, the Nobel prize-winner

First and foremost, this is a daughter's touching memoir of her much-loved father, but the father was William Golding, the Nobel prize-winning author of Lord of the Flies, and Judy Golding's reminiscences are also a useful counterpoint to John Carey's recent biography of the author.

Her perspective is close and personal, yet also – given how many of the book's events occurred when she was very young – full of gaps. Her father is a reliable mountain of a man, laughing at her absurd ways. (Her mother, needless to say, suffers by comparison.) The difficulties her brother had with their father; her own nervous breakdown; the two sides to her father's personality: these are glimpses of something more complex; something darker.