How to Survive Your Mother

In 2004, a chance encounter led TV broadcaster Jonathan Maitland to uncover a disturbing incident involving his parents in the 1960s.

The subject of a huge local scandal at the time, they were ordered to close down the chain of old people's homes they owned.

As he attempts to find out the truth about what happened, Maitland peels back the layers of his extraordinary childhood, revealing how he coped with the outrageous and unpredictable lifestyle of his larger-than-life mother: her marriages, her public suicide attempts, and her outlandish money making schemes. (Having a mother who ran a hostel for gay men can't have been easy for a Surrey schoolboy in 1974!) Entertaining, humorous, disturbing and revelatory, "How to Survive Your Mother" is a movingly honest book about what it feels like to find out things about your mother that you weren't supposed to know.

It will strike a chord with anyone who has ever had issues with their parents.