Publisher's Synopsis
"Living Backwards: A Transatlantic Memoir" incorporates "November 1948" into a longer work that takes ten-year-old Carl from a small gray Yorkshire village to the glaring postwar boom of Los Angeles and back again at fourteen to the sober mill region of his ancestors. Back "home" without his family, he struggles with the loneliness of adolescence and the eccentric strangers of his new life. He attends school in the nearby town of Saltaire, then commemorating its 100th anniversary, and develops a fascination with the town's historical roots as a kind of industrial utopia. He learns about the schemes of Titus Salt, the wealthy mill owner, who built his own town along with the biggest and most efficient woolen mill in Europe. And he lives again in the insecurities of class and money that drove his grandparents and then his parents to America.;It is with both sadness and anticipation that Carl leaves Salt School at year's end to return to the California of the fifties, to the land of fast cars, drive-ins and the first beats of the rock-and-roll era. Through it all "Living Backwards" captures in moving detail a school-boy's feeling of being neither of one place or the other.;Later in the book, as his father loses his battle with Alzheimer's disease, the middle-aged narrator become his father's memory, recalling for him his Yorkshire past, tying together the book's themes of memory and loss, identity and place.
