The Glass Castle: A Memoir Book

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD'Tragic and comic at the same time... an outrageous story, one that will break your heart' Sunday Independent'A terrific story, grippingly told' Sunday Times'I read The Glass Castle straight through in an evening, wearing an expression of slack-jawed amazement'SpectatorWhile Jeannette Walls was living on Park Avenue, covering the Academy Awards and attending black-tie parties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her parents were squatting in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side. Rex Walls, her father, was an ingenious adventurer and a hopeless alcoholic. Her mother was an artist who abhorred domestic routine and the chores of motherhood: 'Why should I cook a meal that will be gone in an hour when I can do a painting that will last forever?' Funny sad, quirky and loving, The Glass Castle is an almost incredible story of a nomadic, impoverished childhood. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING BRIE LARSON, WOODY HARRELSON AND NAOMI WATTS

This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming ‘brilliant' but alcoholic parents. At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the ‘mundane middle class existence' she had always craved. In her apartment overlooked by ‘a portrait of someone else's ancestor' she recounts poignant remembered images of star watching with her father juxtaposed with recollections of irregular meals accidents and police-car chases and reveals her complex feelings of shame guilt pity and pride toward her parents.