Again, well read. Thanks to the author. It’s a difficult book and when someone has taken the time to really inhabit it, I’m very pleased. Course, if you were to read Coetzee’s Disgrace, or Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina before you tackled A of C, you might find it breezy…

Posted on 20. May, 2012 by Sara Rauch in Fiction, Reviews

This is no bucolic childhood. Sina Queyras’s Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books) is a novel about grief, about anger, about familial obligation and madness and conflict. It is an internal, abstracted construction of family. Told in turn by six members of the Combal family, the narrative revolves around the death of one sister, Therese, but plumes out wider, taking in the panoramic view of western Canada and the Combal family history—which includes the teenage death of their eldest brother and the menacing shadow of their brilliant, manic mother, Adel.