Showing Simple Annals: A Memoir of Early Childhood by Roy Watkins

‘The memoir of the world as seen by a child with its partialities and misapprehensions belongs to a distinguished tradition, from Great Expectations to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist and Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child, and from What Maisie Knew to The Death of the Heart. But Watkins does something new and remarkable. He gives a more faithful representation of the child’s perceptions by often leaving its confusions unresolved . . . Everything, real and imaginary, is drawn from faithful recall. This short memoir is an absorbing masterpiece which sustains over its 127 pages the lyric intensity of the great practitioners of the short story.’
– Bernard O’Donoghue, Literary Review