English Summary/英文概要： Before the devastating ’loss of her marbles’, Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously - from Trollope to Woolf, Tennyson to Foucault - swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and of wildlife that will form his character and his career.,br> In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son - Royle’s younger brother - to cancer in his twenties.
At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on climate crisis and ’mother nature’, on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 在毁灭性的失去罗伊尔夫人——一名性格极其严肃，自学成才的人，一名拥有广泛阅读经验的人——从《特罗洛普伍尔夫》,《丁尼生福柯》——她发誓在她邻居和那些如火如荼的年轻的喜欢阅读和野生动物的尼克那里继续她的职业生涯。触摸有趣的家庭生活，文字优美的画像，母子关系和丧亲之痛，尼古拉斯•罗伊尔抓住了战后育儿的精神以及他的母亲的痴呆和死亡的悲剧引发了失去她的其他癌症）——罗伊尔的弟弟的儿子。

这本非凡的回忆录既富有诗意又富有哲理，它也是对气候危机和“大自然母亲”、文学和生活写作、人类和非人类动物以及母性和记忆本身之间联系的有力反思。（WYL)

Awards/获奖情况： “这本书对父母和孩子进行了细致入微的研究，对我们保留的东西和失去的东西进行了细致的判断和衡量，试图捕捉那些瞬息万变的形状:过去消逝时的触摸、语气和凝视。这是一本感人至深的回忆录，是作者技巧和慷慨精神的证明。”——希拉里•蒙托皮斯

’A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writer’s skill and generosity of spirit.’ -- Hilary Mantel

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he established the highly successful MA in Creative and Critical Writing in 2002. He has also had a central role in the shaping of creative writing teaching at Sussex at undergraduate level over the past fifteen years. Nicholas has published two novels with Myriad; Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017). Nicholas has written numerous other critical books, including the academic best-selling textbook An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fifth edition, 2016) (with Andrew Bennett).