Life and a Half

Chris Bryant is an acclaimed historian of Parliament and a Sunday Times bestselling author. He has been the MP for the Rhondda (now Rhondda and Ogmore) since 2001. Between 2020 and 2023, he chaired the Committees on Standards and Privileges, which have guardianship of the Code of Conduct and adjudicate on individual cases. Bryant was the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster. Code of Conduct was an instant top two Sunday Times bestseller and The Glamour Boys won the 2020 Parliamentary Book Award for Best Non-Fiction by a Parliamentarian. His latest book, A Life and a Half, won the 2026 Parliamentary Book Award for Best Biography by a Parliamentarian. He currently serves as Minister of State for Trade Policy.

This absorbing memoir is the kind of book those who bemoan career politicians will love – it stops when Chris Bryant becomes the MP for Rhondda in 2001. Instead, it focuses on his formative years growing up with an alcoholic mother and absent father, suffering sexual abuse, and being ordained into the priesthood. A Life and a Half is perceptive, revealing and full of suppressed trauma, but it can also take on the quality of a mischievous confessional, particularly when recounting wild times in Latin American Christian ministries. Unorthodox but beguilingly human