Skip to content

Radio 2 Book Club: My Old Man

My Old Man by Ted Kessler will feature on the Radio 2 Fact not Fiction Book Club on Thursday 19 May.

The book was selected with the help of a panel made up of Reading Agency and library staff from across the UK. Find out more about the non-fiction strand of the Radio 2 Book Club.

Read an exclusive extract of Ted Kessler talking about his dad and his inspiration for the book.

WIN 10 copies of My Old Man for your reading group – just visit the noticeboard.

My Old Man

If you were asked to write about your father, what would you say?

No two paternal relationships are the same. Every experience, every bond, is unique. And whether happy or sad, fond or fraught, the memories and stories we have about our dads stay with us for ever.

In this carefully curated collection, a dazzling list of contributors – including Florence Welch, Paul Weller, Nina Stibbe and the sons and daughters of Ian Dury, Johnny Ball, Roy Castle, Leonard Cohen and many others – open up, some for the first time, about their paternal experiences.

From the heart-rending to the tragic, from expressions of joyful love to a quick snapshot of a life, these beautifully written pieces are also deeply personal. As universal as it is powerful, My Old Man offers a unique opportunity to reflect on our own relationships with our dads.

Selection panel review

Our reading panel from libraries and The Reading Agency enjoyed My Old Man – here are some of their comments:

“Contributors from the arts and entertainments world write about their fathers. Some are just distant memories from happy or dysfunctional childhoods. Others look deeper into the father-son/daughter connection. Each chapter’s style is as different as the father portrayed, which makes for a varied read. The one thing all the stories do is make you think about your relationship with your own father. I think this will appeal to many people because the stories span generations.”

“A hugely entertaining read, enhanced by the fact that the fathers mentioned are all well-known. This book has humour, sadness, compassion – the ability to evoke many different emotions, any reader would find something to identify with I am sure.”

About the author

Ted was staff writer and editor at the NME throughout the 1990s and has been at Q Magazine since 2004, where he is currently the magazine’s features editor. Living in London with his partner and their two children, Ted has also written for The Observer, Guardian and New Statesman.

Inspired by the website Caught By The River, My Old Man started life as a blog of the same name in 2013. Since then, Ted has been taking his My Old Man live show to festivals throughout the UK.

A word from Ted

“As My Old Man is a collaborative effort, I’d like to say how privileged and honoured I am on behalf of all the book’s contributors that it has been chosen for the Radio 2 Book Club. One of the main ideas at the start of the process when it was just a blog was that it would encourage others to share tales of their own fathers, no matter what shape that story took, and that remains an aim even now that the book is published. Writing about something so fundamental and personal is good for you, no matter how painful or difficult.

As word of the book spreads via the likes of Radio 2 Book Club, more people will hopefully feel encouraged to share their stories. In the meantime, I really hope that the stories contained within My Old Man provide as much enlightenment and joy for readers as they did for me while editing them."

Get involved

Tune in to the Radio 2 Arts Show on Thursday 19 May to hear an interview with Ted Kessler talking about his book.

Have you read My Old Man? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter, using #MyOldMan, or follow author Ted Kessler on Twitter. You can also add a review, or see what other readers thought.

Want to find out more? Take a look at the Radio 2 Book Club Twitter feed or find out more on the Radio 2 Book Club website

Comments

Log in or Sign up to add a comment

News

Radio 2 Book Club - Winter titles

The Winter season of the Radio 2 Book Club is out now, with brilliant brand-new fiction titles to discover. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It features a wide range of titles and authors, recommending great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging listeners to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, and share their opinions and insights on the titles and great reads they’re enjoying right now.

Resources

How to start a reading group

Interested in joining a reading group or starting one of your own? Download our quick guide to getting started. You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online.

News

Discussion guides

We know how useful a discussion guide is for your book club meeting, so here you’ll find some recent guides provided by publishers. Free to download, you can use them to help choose your next book and guide your discussion.

View our other programmes