Dear Lupin...
Letters to a Wayward Son
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Nostalgic, witty and filled with characters and situations that people of all ages will recognise, Dear Lupin is the entire correspondence of a Father to his only son, spanning nearly 25 years. Roger Mortimer's sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, always generous letters to his son are packed with anecdotes and sharp observations, with a unique analogy for each and every scrape Charlie Mortimer got himself into. The trials and tribulations of his youth and early adulthood are received by his father with humour, understanding and a touch of resignation, making them the perfect reminder of when letters were common, but always special.
A racing journalist himself, Roger Mortimer wrote for a living, yet still wrote more than 150 letters to his son as he left school, and lived in places such as South America, Africa, Weston-super-Mare and eventually London. These letters form a memoir of their relationship, and an affectionate portrait of a time gone by.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From 1967 to 1991, Charles Mortimer saved all of the letters written to him by his father, Roger, racing correspondent for the Sunday Times who wrote a classic book on horse racing, The History of the Derby. Collected here (in what was a bestseller in England) the letters successfully present what Charles calls "a humorous insight into the life of a mildly dysfunctional English middle-class family in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s." With his father living in the English countryside, and Charles bouncing from career to career after a failed stint at Eton College, the letters also chart a relationship between father and son that perseveres through thick and thin, including Charles's drug problems. (His father affectionately nicknames him Lupin after the disreputable son in the 19th-century British comic novel The Diary of a Nobody.) None of Charles's responses exist, but he provides short comments after almost every letter, which actually makes the book more compulsively readable, since it allows readers to more fully enjoy Roger's articulate, eccentric, and always deeply British sense of humor. In 1974, advising Charles on job possibilities, he writes, "Have you considered the Church? There is much to be said for the quiet life of a country curate. Fortunately in the Church of England an ordained priest is not committed to any but the vaguest beliefs."
