Tim Waterstone is best known as the founder of Waterstones, a chain of bookshops in the UK. He has also written a few novels and this memoir, published in 2019, the year he turned 80.

About half the book, more than readers will probably expect from the book's tile, is about Tim Waterstone's childhood and education. He was the youngest of three children in an upper middle class family who settled in Sussex when he was 3. He had a very troubled relationship with his angry, abusive father and difficult experiences in his boarding school education from the young age of 6, including an abusive headmaster at his first prep school. His mother's life and that of the family was apparently shaped by her feeling that wherever her husband's employment and wartime military service took him, she needed to live nearby to be a fully supportive wife. His older sister Wendy was lovely, his brother David rather more troubled. He also writes about various members of his extended family. All of these had died some time before he wrote about them here.

After school and Cambridge University, Tim Waterstone took up a chance through a family friend to work in a tea company in India for a few years, where he married for the first time, then joined a graduate training programme with Allied Breweries before moving to WH Smith. His adult life between the early 1960s and 1981, when WH Smith fired him after an unsuccessful attempt to expand the business abroad is quickly skimmed through in a few pages, so the Waterstones years are only about 40% of the book, 117 pages, describing raising funds, establishing policies, recruiting staff, various innovations, Waterstones being taken over by WH Smiths, then becoming an independent chain again.

The book concludes with a couple of short stories (but probably more factual than fiction) separated from the book - as if he felt these stories needed to be told but couldn't fit them into the narrative.

I was a little disappointed by this book. I found Waterstone's writing style a little clunky and sometimes the chatty, anecdotal musings are a bit frustrating. It is quite a quick easy read if reading for pleasure though, and I think the actual business chapters of the story might be useful for someone looking for a few real life case studies for a business studies type course, alongside textbooks and coursework. ( )

Mostly Tim's childhood at the start of the book which didn't interest me, expected there to be more literary references interspersed within the descriptions, it began almost like one of those abuse memoirs so popular a decade ago (A Child Called It), but then the book changed around chapter 18 and it was much more about the world of bookselling, and Tim's dream to provide shops for booklovers. I'm sure his dad is proud of him now, certainly his children must be! I was glad to discover Cloud Atlas author worked in the fiction department at St Margaret's Street - I must have met him! ( )