A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARIn the vein of the Costa-winning Dadland, with the biographical elements of H is for Hawk, The Fragments of my Father is a powerful and poignant memoir about parents and children, freedom and responsibility, madness and creativity and what it means to be a carer.SHORTLISTED FOR THE BARBELLION PRIZEMy life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. But that night, on my mother-s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would -There were holes in Sam Mills-s life when she was growing up - times when her dad was just absent, for reasons she didn-t understand. As she grew older, she began to make up stories about the periods when he wasn-t around: that he-d been abducted, spirited away and held captive by a mysterious tribe who lived at the bottom of the garden. The tru
