The story of one man's unorthodox path to politics, from Labour Minister and Sunday Times-bestselling author Chris Bryant.
The gripping, remarkably candid story of one man’s unorthodox life before politics, from Labour minister and Sunday Times-bestselling author Chris Bryant
‘Charming, unexpected, honest’ RORY STEWART
'Fascinating, frank, funny and moving' REVEREND RICHARD COLES
'An unexpected delight' GRAHAM NORTON
Before he was a politician, Chris Bryant was an Anglican priest, baptising babies and holding the hands of the dying. Before that, he manned the barricades in Latin America, and before that, he was the scared son of an alcoholic mother and an estranged father.
This is a no-holds-barred account of a minister’s truly unconventional life before politics – one that has left Bryant equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay clubs, on the hustings or the stage. With characteristic frankness, he recounts growing up in General Franco’s Spain, acting alongside some of the most talented names of the day as a teenager, and caring for his brother and mother as she descended into addiction. He ran the family home from sixteen, became ordained at twenty-four and came out as gay shortly after. And that’s just the early years.
A Life and a Half tells a gripping story of bishops and actors, drag queens and pushy candidates, stuffed with moments of joy and hilarity and sorrow and abuse. All while tracking the landscape of late-twentieth-century British politics, from Thatcher to the birth of New Labour. It is a memoir like no other.
"Startling . . . Filled with a litany of Bryant’s eye-popping escapades" - Irish 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
