Damian Barr - Maggie and Me

‘Certain memoirs catch a moment and seem to define it, bottle it. Nick Hornby did it in 1992 with Fever Pitch, and Damian Barr, I suspect, is about to do something of the same with this hugely entertaining book, which views the whole tortuous legacy of Thatcherism through the prism of one confused, isolated little boy from the roughest side of the Scottish tracks’
Sunday Times

It’s 12 October 1984. An IRA bomb blows apart the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

In small-town Scotland, eight-year-old Damian Barr watches in horror as his mum rips off her wedding ring and packs their bags. He knows that he, like Maggie Thatcher, must survive.

In his new book Maggie and Me - just released to great critical acclaim and selected as a forthcoming Radio 4 Book of the Week - Barr shows us how he did survive. He discovers that stories can save your life and – in spite of violence, strikes, AIDS and Clause 28 – manages to fall in love dancing to Madonna in Glasgow’s only gay club. Now a journalist living in Brighton, he talks about his experiences.

'Shocking and funny in equal measure, and will have you weeping with laughter and sorrow' Independent on Sunday