Diana Athill

The Triumph of Love

The Three of Us: A Memoir

By

Jonathan Cape 320pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

I am on the verge of feeling hostile towards books about people surviving appalling childhoods, and it seems that I am not alone in feeling like that: I have just read a piece by Libby Brooks in The Guardian in which she remarks that shelves seem to be ‘heaving’ with them nowadays – a suggestive choice of verb. So I had reservations about embarking on Julia Blackburn’s memoir, which tells just such a story. The fact that I was unable to put it down is proof of how well she tells it, and of how such an experience, if described with real skill, honesty and sensitivity, will make a valuable book, however many others of a similar kind have been published.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us