The story of one man's unorthodox path to politics, from Labour Minister and Sunday Times-bestselling author Chris Bryant.

WINNER OF BEST BIOGRAPHY BY A PARLIAMENTARIAN, WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS 2026

'Scurrilous and full of heart' GRAHAM NORTON
'Fascinating, frank, funny and moving' REVEREND RICHARD COLES
'Terrific' FINANCIAL TIMES
'Beguilingly human' OBSERVER
'Riveting, raw and hilarious' HELEN LEDERER

The blisteringly candid account of a life that has taken Sunday Times-bestselling author and minister Chris Bryant to some truly unexpected places.

Raised in Francoist Spain by an alcoholic mother and an absent father, Bryant would go on to act alongside some of the great names of the day, man the barricades in Chile and later become an Anglican priest, all before he turned forty. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, peopled with bishops, actors, drag queens and pushy candidates, A Life and a Half is a politician's memoir like no other.

"This absorbing memoir is the kind of book those who bemoan career politicians will love – it stops when Chris Bryant becomes the MP for Rhondda in 2001. Instead, it focuses on his formative years growing up with an alcoholic mother and absent father, suffering sexual abuse, and being ordained into the priesthood. A Life and a Half is perceptive, revealing and full of suppressed trauma, but it can also take on the quality of a mischievous confessional, particularly when recounting wild times in Latin American Christian ministries. Unorthodox but beguilingly human" - Observer

"Bryant is one of the handful of sitting MPs who can genuinely write. As you’d expect, A Life and a Half is a terrific book, funny, frank and moving in equal measure. It is not just a story of changing careers: in many ways it is a story of coming to terms with yourself . . . Although it is not a political memoir, it is in many ways the story of how Bryant went from a boy unable to speak to one of Parliament’s most eloquent MPs. We can only hope that we might one day get an account of everything that has happened to Bryant in the 21st century that is half as good as this book" - Financial Times

"Startling . . . Filled with a litany of Bryant’s eye-popping escapades" - Irish Times

"This is a riveting read: self-revelatory, candid about others, and packed with outrageous stories . . . This autobiography is also the story of a man who survived an appalling childhood to lead a varied and worthwhile life as a priest and then politician . . . All told with self-deprecating humour" - Church Times

"Having previously written several books, including a biography of Glenda Jackson, he has now turned the pen on himself in A Life and a Half. It spans his mother’s alcoholism, his parents’ divorce, the university interlude in which he dabbled with being a member of the Conservative Party, his relationships with women and men, his spell as an Anglican vicar and the liberation of leaving the Church and discovering gay life in London in the 1990s" - Sunday Times

"An MP’s memoir that stops as soon as he actually arrives in parliament, focusing instead on the much more human story of how he got there" - New Statesman