I Know You are Going to be Happy: The Story of a Sixties Family - Tapa dura

"Compulsive read - What makes it fascinating is witnessing Christiansen's attempt to establish a relationship with his father, for the first time, in these pages. powerful and haunting."-The Guardian "Funny, truthful, and in the end a very painful account of the devastation caused to a small boy by his father leaving the family... Reading Christiansen's tender, insightful, clear-eyed account of it all is a remarkable experience." -The Observer "The evocative portrayal of a single parent family in the Fifties reminds us that nothing in history seems so distant as the day before yesterday." -Mail on Sunday "There is no self-pity in these pages; there is very little self at all, which results in the spare beauty of the prose." -Telegraph "He writes elegant prose, and describes his subjects with an elegiac compassion." - Jessica Mann, Literary Review "Dance and music critic Christiansen gives a moving, unsparing account of how promising careers in journalism and the good wishes of friends for their marriage turned sour for his mother and father." Saga Magazine

They married at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in September 1948, the groom, the ambitious son of the editor of the Express; the bride, the beautiful, somewhat rebellious daughter of blamelessly upstanding family of the provincial middle-middle class. A young man who was pushed forward by family expectation, a young woman pulled back...In this poignant and perceptive portrait of his parents' catastrophically acrimonious divorce, Rupert Christiansen tells the story of a generation. With the narrative power of the likes of The Ice Storm and Revolutionary Road, he chronicles the experience not just of one particular class, but of an era, when the loosening of the stays on middle-class marriage precipitated a rollercoaster decade of heartbreak and loss.