'Vivid and compelling and so moving... both painful and comforting to read' Marian Keyes
**A BOOK OF THE YEAR - GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER (December 2022)**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD AND AN POST IRISH BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR 2022**
**AS BROADCAST ON BBC RADIO 4**

Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn't have on cars, suits and shoes fit for a prince. Both of her parents were waiting for paradise. It never came.

Caught between three worlds, Irish, Caribbean and British in 1960s Birmingham, Kit and her brothers and sisters knew all the words to the best songs, caught sticklebacks in jam jars and braved hunger and hellfire until they could all escape.

WITHOUT WARNING AND ONLY SOMETIMES is a story of an extraordinary childhood and how a girl who grew up in house where the Bible was the only book on offer went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day.

"Extraordinary . . . De Waal has a gift for the deft detail that will bring a story or character alive . . . A moving, heart-warming account of a girl who grows up in a house with no books except the Bible, gets in with a bad crowd and nearly goes under. In the end, and after she has left home, she is saved by books. When she can't sleep she reads the classics. Now she may even have written one" - Sunday Times

"An astonishingly good evocation of the dream and reality of migration to postwar Birmingham" - Observer

"A terrific evocation of her family life in 1960s Birmingham" - Financial Times

"In the end, this is a survivor's story. It doesn't pull any punches, but it ends with a girl determined to live, to "turn the page and keep reading"" - Telegraph

"Intelligent, angry and sometimes very funny" - Scotsman

"A delightful and harrowing book. I can't think of another since Edmund Gosse's Father and Son that gives such a well-written child's-eye view of an upbringing in a suffocating Christian sect . . . I highly recommend" - Irish Times

"This is a sometimes bleak, often funny tale of finding a way to live through reading, which is all the more amazing given the only book in Kit's house was the Bible" - Radio Times, Book of the Week