Picador, 332pp, £16.99
The title of the late Jonathan Raban's last book evokes Edmund Gosse's classic of the same name, though the text never refers to it. One chapter was left unfinished, both about homecoming: Raban's from a rehab ward in Seattle, where a stroke had confined him in 2009; and his father Peter's return from the Second World War, hastened by the mental breakdown of his wife, to whom he had sent often passionate letters while away. Wheeler found the book rambled but forgave Raban given ‘his acute description of the foibles and failures of being human’.
