Flickerbook

Leila Berg (1917–2012) grew up in a Jewish immigrant neighbourhood in Salford, Greater Manchester. Flickerbook records her childhood and early youth. In the late 1960s she devised, wrote for and edited the Nippers series of early readers, pioneering the inclusion of working-class and ethnic-minority experience and language in books for children. Her books about childhood and progressive education include Risinghill: Death of a Comprehensive, Reading and Loving and Look at Kids!

‘A strikingly original autobiography, vivid and poetic, funny, sensuous and searingly raw.’ – Times Educational Supplement‘Flickerbook proceeds through glimpses and vignettes, short paragraphs and big leaps, but there is more of a narrative structure than the title might suggest. It is artful in the best sense, and a radical experiment in memoir-writing. Very quietly the important themes are developed: integrity, honesty, inclusiveness, freedom of thought. Some parts are very funny, and it is through a shared sense of humour – they laugh at Marx brothers films – that young Leila forms a guarded late friendship with her widowed father. This reissue is wholly welcome.’ – Norma Clarke, Times Literary Suplement (2021)‘This extraordinary memoir … is a series of evocative images which tentatively recreate the emotions of a young girl ... It works magnificently well … the honesty and poetic insight of this superb autobiography.’ – Times Literary Supplement (1997)‘This may be the autobiography of one little girl, from baby bridesmaid to Young Communist rebel losing two lovers to the Spanish Civil War, but it has a universal quality – you’ll be catapulted straight back to your own childhood.’ – She‘A wonderfully vivid depiction of the radicalism of the 1930s and, beyond that, an exceptionally artful and honest portrait of adolescent rites of passage.’ – Independent on Sunday‘An evocative picture of a time and a society, shot through with brilliant vignettes.’ – Penelope Lively