Stuff Martin Rowson Jonathan Cape, 336pp, £14.99 ISBN 0224079239

This moving family memoir by the cartoonist Martin Rowson is a world away from his acerbic and satirical illustrations that appear regularly in the Guardian. Having lost his father and stepmother within a few months of each other, Rowson uses the process of sorting through their possessions – a lifetime’s bric-a-brac – as a spring-board for writing about his past.

The book initially seems messy in its approach, flitting from descriptions of the adolescent Rowson’s obsession with the Soviet Union to passages about the death of his mother from a brain haemorrhage when he was just ten, but this soon comes to seem a very apt way of ordering his memories.

After his mother’s death, his father, an eminent virologist, married again. Rowson seems to have had a very warm relationship with his stepmother, and the book’s most moving passages concern her declining health, especially in the months following his father’s death, when she seemed almost to will her life to end. Rowson, who was adopted as a child, also includes his search for his birth mother and the discovery of his half-siblings.

Frequently touching without being mawkish, Stuff is a surprisingly life-affirming read and, despite the emotive subjects being covered, often a very funny one, too.

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