My first seven years (plus a few more)

A great coming-of-age novel, "My First Seven Years (plus a few more)" is Dario Fo's fantastic extraordinary memoir of his formative years, following his railwayman father around the various villages on the shores of Lago Maggiore in Northern Italy where they lived.

Born in 1926 and growing up between the wars, Fo witnessed at close hand the struggles between Fascists and Partisans in the mountainous north.

The book is filled with the anecdotes, characters and sketches that were the inspiration for the creative genius of this winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1997).

Above all it is a book filled with the characteristic vitality and humour that springs from all his written work.

More than just a memoir, "My First Seven Years' is a work of literature that follows in a great line of imaginative childhood accounts, such as "Proust's Remembrance of Things Past" and "Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, through, Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo stories."