The Scent of Dried Roses: One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy (Penguin Modern Classics)

'The Scent of Dried Roses touches a nerve no other English memoir has found; it does so in a way that seems not only affecting, but somehow important' - Sebastian Faulks 'This is a moving, insightful, important book. It works as a personal story, as an analysis of the unknowable horrors of suicide and as a history of a changing Britain' - William Hague 'In its slow and careful way, it unfolds a certain topography of melancholia, and the map Lott makes of his troubles mixes the intricate streets he has walked in all his life with some pretty intricate places in his own mind and heart. We are left with a resounding lament for small England ... The book's recreation of a suburban world, its flashing-back and forward in real time, its compilation of whispers and roars and half-remembered truths, its reliance on the intimacies of interior monologue, are bound to make some people think of fiction' - Andrew O'Hagan 'Brilliant. I don't remember reading any text which is so personal, so particular and near the bone and yet which is so utterly without self-regard' - Hilary Mantel 'Outstanding ! tracing his parents' marriage, Lott conveys, with a brilliant, almost Orwellian command of social and historical nuance, what England looked and felt like, decade by decade, from 1930 to 1989 ! it is a story told with courage, candour and astonishing command of detail' Blake Morrison

Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.