"Best book I have read so far this year. On a par with Hilary Mantel or Joan Didion. Utterly terrifying, funny, thought provoking and seemingly without an ounce of self-pity. A masterpiece". --Scott Pack
In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live. He had lost nine years of his life to vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally in Spain and Crete. This memoir is an account of those years; redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love and fatherhood; recovery and a life-saving liver graft. This book has also won the prize for creative Non-fiction, in the Wales Book of the Year 2012 Awards.
"The Vagabond’s Breakfast belongs in a strangely hybrid way to two distinct genres: the literature of, for want of a better term, tramping and the literature of illness. On the one hand we have Kerouac, Genet, George Orwell; on the other Dermot Welch, Nerval, Dostoyevsky... Gwyn, in this book, straddles the genres by sandwiching two memoirs – the story of his dissolute past on the other hand and, on the other, as consequence and antithesis, that of his current battle with illness. The illness is the result of the dissolution, but it’s also its mirror image – it’s a defining business, one that takes over the life of its host to the exclusion of almost everything else. This makes for some bare, and harrowing, writing." Charles Lambert
"An enthralling memoir of a young man going deeply and terribly astray." Tessa Hadley in the London Review of Books.
"A jagged tale gracefully told. Full of humane surreality, there s something whole, even holistic, about the brokenness of the life it pieces (back) together." Patrick McGuinness in the TLS
In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live. He had lost nine years of his life to vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally in Spain and Crete. This memoir is an account of those years; redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love and fatherhood; recovery and a life-saving liver graft. This book has also won the prize for creative Non-fiction, in the Wales Book of the Year 2012 Awards.
"The Vagabond’s Breakfast belongs in a strangely hybrid way to two distinct genres: the literature of, for want of a better term, tramping and the literature of illness. On the one hand we have Kerouac, Genet, George Orwell; on the other Dermot Welch, Nerval, Dostoyevsky... Gwyn, in this book, straddles the genres by sandwiching two memoirs – the story of his dissolute past on the other hand and, on the other, as consequence and antithesis, that of his current battle with illness. The illness is the result of the dissolution, but it’s also its mirror image – it’s a defining business, one that takes over the life of its host to the exclusion of almost everything else. This makes for some bare, and harrowing, writing." Charles Lambert
"An enthralling memoir of a young man going deeply and terribly astray." Tessa Hadley in the London Review of Books.
"A jagged tale gracefully told. Full of humane surreality, there s something whole, even holistic, about the brokenness of the life it pieces (back) together." Patrick McGuinness in the TLS
