Sins of My Father

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What to expect

'An extraordinary story' CLOVER STROUD
'Astonishing and valuable' THE SPECTATOR
'Beautifully written' DAILY MAIL
'Intensely gripping . . . as brutal and funny as it is raw and candid' VIV GROSKOP
'As vivid an account of addiction as I can remember reading' GUARDIAN
'Will resonate with anyone who has loved a difficult parent and spent a lifetime trying to work them out' ALI MILLAR

When Lily Dunn was six years old, her father left for India to join the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She grew up enthralled by the myth of him - a brilliant, charismatic writer and entrepreneur who would appear with gifts from faraway places. Yet he was also a compulsive liar whose pursuit of transcendence took him from sex addiction, via the Rajneesh cult, to a relentless chase of money, which ended in ruin and finally addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. A daughter's investigation into a father who was always out of reach, Sins of My Father is a gripping detective story that asks how much we can forgive of those we love.

Critics Review

  • Sins of My Father is Dunn’s attempt to know her father, constantly on the move, impossible to rely on . . . she puts it together as if she is a detective working a long-forgotten cold case, and though its setting is very different, it reminded me of Laura Cummings’ gripping memoir, On Chapel Sands . . . there is beauty in its crisp, cold clarity . . . as vivid an account of addiction as I can remember reading. Sins of My Father is a testament to the damage done, but it reads, in the end, like the slow discovery of freedom

    GUARDIAN
  • This is a memoir of two lives: Dunn’s father, who took enthusiastically to the Rajneesh cult and Dunn, whose life is overshadowed by this early abandonment. She writes with cold, controlled anger but also empathy. It’s a gripping tale

    THE TIMES
  • An extraordinary story . . . brilliantly captures the painful truth of impossible love. Sins of My Father is both page-turning and lyrical, an inspiration . . . one of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long time

    CLOVER STROUD, author of MY WILD AND SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
  • Considerable courage is needed to return to the stark, bright light of trauma in this shirking-nothing way; but writing of this intensity has delivered an astonishing and valuable memoir

    THE SPECTATOR
  • I was obsessed with Sins of My Father, a memoir which combines the emotional and the cerebral in telling the story of a life through the prism of a father’s influence. The stories of the children of hippies, or parents who chose experimental lifestyles, is fascinating and fertile territory and although this story is Lily’s own, she also speaks for a cohort. It is a victory of self-knowledge and compassion, as well as art

    AMY LIPTROT, author of THE OUTRUN
  • A brutally honest consideration of toxic familial love and human frailty

    i NEWSPAPER

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