Author(s): John Simpson

NZ non-fiction

'I have already touched on my childhood in "Strange Places, Questionable People". But the further through life I get the more I want to revisit it. I want to look at the whole of my childhood, the England I grew up in and my family.' This is not a mere exercise in nostalgia, rather it is a journey through the England of the late 1940s in all its shabby wonder, which also tells the somewhat strange and often deeply painful story of John Simpson's family. Here we meet his father and his grandmother, still living in the small and rather depressing south London suburb which his family built, dominated and, finally, declined with. We meet the grandfather who drank the family money away and abandoned his wife and children, and the grandfather who toured the country with a Wild West show. We learn, too, of the broken marriages and the unfulfilled lives, of the people who died, and the lives which were just beginning. Candid, beautifully written and touching, "Days from a Different World" will enchant all those who read it. First published 2005.