Did the stork drop you at the wrong address?

A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family,

Flesh Wounds author Richard Glover’s favourite dinner party game is called ‘Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?’. It’s a game he always thinks he’ll win.

There was his mother, a deluded snob, who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard’s English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed-toy collector.

There was his father, a distant alcoholic, who ran through a gamut of wives, yachts and failed dreams.

And there was Richard himself, a confused teenager, vulnerable to strange men, trying to find a family he could belong to. As he eventually accepted, the only way to make sense of the present was to go back to the past – but beware of what you might find there. Truth can leave wounds – even if they are only flesh wounds.

Part poignant family memoir, part rollicking venture into a 1970s Australia, this is a book for anyone who’s wondered if their family is the oddest one on the planet. The answer: ‘No’. There is always something stranger out there.

Richard Glover is well known as a radio broadcaster, newspaper columnist and author, including the humour book Desperate Husbands, which was a bestseller in Australia and has been published in translation in Italy and Poland. 

‘Not since UNRELIABLE MEMOIRS by Clive James has there been a funnier, more poignant portrait of an Australian childhood.’ – The Australian Financial Review

Flesh Wounds by Richard Glover – click here to purchase from Dymocks