Dadland

Tom Carew was something else, a charismatic and fearless commando who parachuted in to prepare the French Resistance for D-Day and then by age 25 was known as "Lawrence of Burma" for coaxing the anticolonialists there to side with the British against the Japanese. Those days, though, are long distant when his daughter Keggie begins to unravel his history: his wartime heroism as well as the decades of peace that proved far more difficult. With her dad almost fully consumed by dementia, Keggie weaves stories of war and family strife into an intricate, imaginative, and unsparing memoir that has been compared to H Is for Hawk but more closely resembles a surprising amalgam of Ben Macintyre's true-spy tales and Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?