Father and Son

Raban's final book is the story of two journeys: his father's, as a British officer, through the World War II battlefields of Dunkirk, North Africa, and Anzio, and his own, as he recovers from, and adapts to the permanent effects of, a stroke at age 68. It covers much less ground, but Raban's own journey is the more harrowing and compelling of the two, as this famously curious and curmudgeonly writer and traveler, who transplanted himself from Britain to the north slope of Queen Anne Hill in 1990 and spent the rest of his life there, including a dozen semi-immobile years after his stroke, struggles to reclaim his independence. A book full of affection for his daughter and a more distant admiration for his father, it is most of all a testament to the power and endless interest of a life of reading and writing.