Christine Cohen Park
BOOKS and PUBLICATIONS
Christine's memoir, novels and collections of short stories
In My Father’s House
a Memoir
A ten-year-old girl spends an unforgettable year with the father she comes to adore — and from whom she will be separated.
Her father is Lewis Cohen, later Lord Cohen, a charismatic maverick politician and Brighton’s first Labour Mayor. A flamboyant, generous and colourful tycoon who left school at fourteen, he revelled in being a Labour man in a stolidly Conservative town: one of the last of the Champagne Socialists.
In this funny, poignant and revealing memoir, Christine Cohen Park recalls the all-too-brief year she spent with him after her parents’ divorce. From the grandly furnished home in Dyke Road Avenue to wrestling with her eleven-year-old cousin and eating faggots and mash in Kemptown’s mean streets, no detail escapes her gimlet eye.
Caburn Press, October 2026 ISBN 978-1-0669837-0-4
Joining the Grown-ups
At eighteen, Josie considers herself all grown up. But Josie has one more step to take. She wants to be part of her mother's life. And so, against her father's advice, she leaves her home in Canada for London and the mother she hasn't seen since she was a child. The woman Josie remembers was at the centre of a busy family, but now she is a successful literary agent, living with another woman. When Josie comes barging into her mother's life with her needs and her good intentions she stirs up the present as well as the past - and discovers that in learning about her mother she also learns about herself.
"the stuff of which the best sort of best-seller is made" - The Times
"An ebullient novel; I enjoyed it immensely" - Daily Telegraph
Heinemann ISBN 0-14-009991-3
The Househusband
When Tony lost his job as a manager of a West End record store, it seemed logical for him to stay at home and look after the baby whilst his wife continued her increasingly successful publishing career.
Seven years and another child later he is at his wits end; pride and confidence destroyed. He meets Alex by chance on Hampstead Heath. Young, attractive and bored with her A-levels, she responds to his desperate need for company. Each offers the other a respite from the monotony of their lives.
But changing seasons bring a changing pattern of need. The fragile world they share with the children on the Heath, and the stability of Tony's family are both undermined by his wife's violent jealousy. As their feelings become deeper and more dangerous, there are painful choices to be made.
"Confirms Christine Park's reputation as a major literary talent" - The Times
Heinemann ISBN 0-434-57742-1
A Key to Lock Out Cougars
In 2005, writer Giles Colvin arrives from London on the island of Cortes, British Columbia. He’s there to research the life of its most famous, and reclusive inhabitant, the naturalist Deirdre Delapp. As Giles attempts to explore the intricacies of Delapp’s life, the resistant locals revisit their own stories – those they are prepared to share, and those they are not. When the harshest of winters sets in, Giles is marooned on Delapp’s neighbouring small island with only her companion of 30 years, Rig Torsen, for company. Rig is as determined to hold on to his memories as Giles is to probe them. A Key to Lock Out Cougars is a love story, an environmental thriller and an examination of the tension between conservation and the impetus for growth. It explores the nature of change and loss, and what it is that endures in a fragile environment.
"A Key to Lock Out Cougars is a compelling narrative about intriguing characters… such things as the feeling of connection with the natural work, or the story of how a person comes to an island for a week and ends up staying for a lifetime, really rings true... As the literary executor of Gilean Douglas, I was especially interested in the way aspects of her situation inspired the story of Deirdre Delapp.” - Jill Milton, archivist, Cortes Island Museum
ISBN 978-1-62407-940-5
Close Company
edited with Caroline Heaton
In this stunning collection of stories about mothers and daughters the world over, tales of pleasure and sadness, devotion and ambivalence, curiosity and bewilderment mix, just as they do in real life. Ranging widely in time and place, the twenty-five stories here, with their variety of experience and emotion, offer intriguing perpectives on this complex and powerful bond.
Authors include Margaret Atwood, Colette, Janet Frame, Zhang Jie, Sylvia Plath and Jeanette Winterson.
"Rich and culturally diverse...... It succeeds beautifully as a collection" - The Listener
Virago ISBN 0-86068-888-7
Caught in a Story
edited with Caroline Heaton
The fairytale has been a popular and enduring genre for centuries, using all the power and enchantment of the archetype to reach deep into our unconscious. This anthology of contemporary fairy tales and fables demonstrates the appeal this age-old form still has for modern writers as a way of illuminating life's rites of passage and psychological transitions.
This rich and varied collection of twenty stories, many appearing for the first time, work together providing a subversive, sidelong glance at ourselves and the world.
The authors include A.S. Byatt, Ben Okri, Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Michael Bracewell, Leonora Carrington and Tatyana Tolstaya
Vintage ISBN 0-09-986420-7
Other Publications
Fiction
L.A Light, The Jewish Quarterly
Lost in the Wilderness, The Jewish Quarterly
That Spark of a Boy, The Needlewriters Anthology
Non fiction
Journal of A Wishy-Washy Liberal: Travelling through Israel and Palestine: Jewish Quarterly - 2014
Pockets of Hope: European Judaism - 2017
Sons as their Mothers' Memoirists, (Melbourne University)
A Comparison of Blake Morrison’s books about his father and his mother (University of Plymouth)
Reviews, including of Gabriel Josipovici’s A Life, (The Jewish Quarterly)