I Know You are Going to be Happy

Compulsive read - What makes it fascinating is witnessing Christiansen's attempt to establish a relationship with his father, for the first time, in these pages. powerful and haunting.

Funny, truthful, and in the end a very painful account of the devastation caused to a small boy by his father leaving the family... Reading Christiansen's tender, insightful, clear-eyed account of it all is a remarkable experience.

The evocative portrayal of a single parent family in the Fifties reminds us that nothing in history seems so distant as the day before yesterday.

There is no self-pity in these pages; there is very little self at all, which results in the spare beauty of the prose.

He writes elegant prose, and describes his subjects with an elegiac compassion.

Dance and music critic Christiansen gives a moving, unsparing account of how promising careers in journalism and the good wishes of friends for their marriage turned sour for his mother and father.