The Scent of Dried Roses: One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy

With a new Introduction by
Blake Morrison

‘A remarkable memoir

… to read it is to be spellbound as by a gripping novel’

Ruth Rendell

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.

‘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