Great News

The episodes from 1953: In My Father’s House, which I’ve been posting on Substack — and which some of you have been reading online and enjoying — have now been extended and turned into a full-length memoir.

In My Father’s House will be published on October 10th and is now available for pre-order from Amazon.

IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE  Christine Cohen Park

A ten-year-old girl spends an unforgettable year with the father she comes to adore — and from whom she will be separated…

The father is Lewis Cohen, later Lord Cohen, a charismatic maverick politician and Brighton’s first Labour Mayor, who played a significant part in the town’s development from the 1920s to the 1960s.

A flamboyant, generous and colourful tycoon who left school at fourteen, he revelled in being a Labour man in a stolidly Conservative town. He was one of the last of the Champagne Socialists from an epoch fast retreating into the past.

Now, in this revealing, funny and poignant memoir, his daughter 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 the eleven-year-old boy cousin with whom she is expected to share a bedroom, to eating faggots and mash in Kemptown’s mean streets, no detail escapes her gimlet eye.

This is a perceptive portrait of a child seeking to penetrate the heady, bewildering world of adults and politics. More than that, it is the story of a love affair of the heart between a father and daughter which, when punctuated, leaves a legacy it takes seventy years to unravel.

If you’d like to read the book, do put in your order — and if you enjoy it, I’d be enormously grateful if you would consider leaving a review. Reviews really do help books find their readers.

Thank you

C. C. P.