Love from Boy

Critics Review

• A touching collection that throws new light on one of the greatest of all children’s book writers . . . The sense of humour, often dark and subversive, that would come to delight the readers of Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Witches, dances through the pages of this wonderful book . . . Each chronological subdivision of this lovely book is illustrated with drawings, maps and photographs and prefaced by Donald Sturrock’s exemplary editorial explanations. The letters become a delightfully original form of biography, as their author changes from child into student, into trainee fighter pilot in Iraq and Egypt, wartime daredevil in Greece and Palestine, diplomat in Washington, and unlikely British spy

  Evening Standard

• Love From Boy, in all its cunning unreliability, becomes more fascinating the more you think about it. It is a work of showmanship, written for someone to whom the author would always be a child. As the backdrop to one of the world’s greatest children’s writers, it’s so wonderfully complicated you’d have thought even Dahl couldn’t have made it up. Except that he did

  Daily Telegraph

• Sturrock’s carefully chosen letters, complemented by a judicious selection of biographical and photographic material, testify to a bond between mother and son that is unbreakable, even in the face of boarding school, war and sexual jokes about Hitler

  The Times, Book of the Week

• Sturrock is right to claim that the letters to his mother show, in embryo, essential features of Dahl’s art, such as his fantastical imagination and his sadistic sense of humour

  Sunday Times

• [An] entertaining and eye-opening collection . . . it is his younger self that is captured here – jaunty and anarchic, yet a recognisable forerunner of that more subtly anarchic, stooping, cardiganed figure who was the world-famous author, gazing out on the world from his garden shed with watery, mischievous eyes

  Literary Review

• [An] enjoyable selection from Dahl’s devoted four-decade correspondence with his mother . . . an intriguing mixture of absolute intimacy, a total disregard for priggishness or decorum, fierce candour, and, in certain respects, a complete absence of it

  Guardian

• Sturrock’s commentary on the letters is meticulous, thoughtful and kind. Anyone looking for revelations, kiss and tell or psychoanalytic exposure will be disappointed. It’s a fascinating view of an extraordinary mid-20th century, upper-middle-class British boy and man talking to his extraordinary Norwegian mother

  Observer

• It offers an insight not only to Dahl’s close relationship with his mother but also a glimpse into how he became one of the greatest children’s authors of the 20th century

  Independent

• A fascinating collection

  Mail on Sunday

• Lovingly edited and deftly commented upon by his biographer Donald Sturrock

  Spectator