Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #325096 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-06
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 3
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.co.uk Review
Given her start in life, it is all the more remarkable that Andrea Ashworth should have turned out to be an Oxford graduate with such a compelling memoir under her belt. Her father died when she was five, her mother was left, poor and isolated in 70s, depressed Manchester to bring up Andrea and her younger sister singlehandedly. Along comes a physically abusive stepfather who sets about dragging the young family into the pits of despair, petty crime and sordid poverty. But Ashworth writes an enchanting story that blends social history (the 70s are rendered with an acute eye for detail) with poetic intensity. She turns a child's uncomprehending gaze on the domestic horrors of working- class life when it is dominated by a vicious man and drunken, self-pitying mother. We know, as we listen with Andrea, that her mother has decided to leave her man when she puts Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" on the turntable. Unfortunately, we know, too, that she was kidding herself when said man comes home and twirls her round the front room to the sound of Motown disco. We know, because Ashworth makes us re-live her childhood by dint of her astonishing gift for storytelling. --Lilian Pizzichini

Scotsman
'This is a brilliant book. Brilliantly written, brilliantly thought, brilliantly remembered'

Margaret Forster, Sunday Telegraph
'That rare thing, a book that is needed...Andrea Ashworth is a role-model without parallel'

Customer Reviews

Not just a harrowing tale!
Andrea Ashworth does indeed provide us with a fantastic story of how she battled against the violence and hardship of a Manchester back-street life but this book is so much more than this. It's not really a harrowing 'Angela's Ashes' tale that has you shedding tears at every page turn; it's an amazingly detailed account of simply growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Andrea was born in 1969, the same year as myself, and although I experienced nothing of her physical abuse at the hands of drunken stepfathers, her incredible attention to detail evoked many of my own experiences of adolescence that I had forgotten. She remembers amazing precise details of TV programmes, what songs were in the charts, minute details of fashions and recreates the fear and wonderment that any girl surely feels while growing up.

Don't be put off this book thinking that it will be traumatic reading - it's also packed with funny anecdotes, and snatches of dialogue from a fast-fading era.

I'm sure Andrea Ashworth's story is not one in a million. Thousands of people experience what she went through on streets up and down the country every day, but what makes HER one in a million is her ability to tell it in such a vivid manner.

What reading is all about
Anyone on the train watching me read the first couple of chapters of this book would have witnessed the outward signs of a mental battle. I put the book down, only to pick it up again a second later and so it continued througout the first few chapters. Too painful to read and yet the writing was so lean and true.I couldn't resist.

This book could so easily have turned into a self pitying, and purely shocking book. But the account is so evenly balanced, and the under statement so well judged that the reader is left fighting "Andy's" corner all the more. I was carried along in the rollercoaster,hoping against hope that each "new man" was "the one", not willing to resign myself to the fact that the page would end in flying fists and broken ornaments. I felt the hurt every time.

Yes, the accademic success is a triumph over adversity, but far beyond that is the connection with something greater beyond those four walls.

I cannot claim to have had the same experiences, I'm lucky. But the greatness of this book is that , that doesn't matter.

As someone once said, "You read to know you are not alone" Ashworth found sanctury in the words of others and I found it in hers.

Read it.

Andrea Ashworth's memoir is truly inspiring
I can definitely say that this is the most amazing book that I have ever read. For me what made it so compelling is the fact that the events Ashworth describes are that of her own life, which make the book both hearatbreaking yet extremely uplifting. Because it rings so true you find yourself empathising with Andrea and rooting for her, willing her to survive the "fire" and escape the house where her childhood traumas took place. As an 18-year-old I could identify with some of her teenage problems but also realised that compared to her I have been extremely fortunate in my life so far. If you want to appreciate what you have got, read this book. The part that affected me most was when Andrea and her sister Laurie found all the knives in the house and made sheaths for them out of sellotape and cardboard in an attempt to render them harmless, afraid that their stepfather was eventually about to kill their mother. This made me realise how lucky I am never to have had to fear for my safety of the safety of someone in my family in my own home. But I felt more admiration than pity for Andrea, who through education and a love of books, succeded enough to be able to escape from home to pursue her dreams at Oxford University. Despite the many sad events in this book, the ending is remarkably positive, with Andrea leaving home in a taxi bound for Oxford. Although it is a story of abuse and terror, it is by no means depressing. A truly inspirational book which I don't think I will ever forget.