A story familiar to too many in Wales

Long Going is a powerful, unflinching memoir that sings with Sophie Calon’s love for her eccentric, witty father while recounting his drink-fuelled disintegration

- SARA ROBINSON

FEW books grip me from the opening lines. Fewer still leave me coming up for air five hours later, feeling like my insides have been through a spin cycle. Long Going, by Welsh author Sophie Calon, subtitled “a daughter's memoir of a dad who drank” is one of those. It’s not light holiday reading, but I've recommended it to everyone I know.

At 50, Calon’s father was a high-flying lawyer. At 55, he was found dead in Cardiff city centre at Christmas. In between, he pinged between homeless shelters, park benches and prison cells. For a time, in a cruel twist of symmetry, he lived in a tent in Callaghan Square, beneath the shadow of a building where he had worked on multimillion-pound deals so recently.

Long Going explores how addiction can unravel someone slowly, imperceptibly, until there’s nothing left but fragments of the person you knew. It's a powerful, poetic memoir pulsing with Calon’s love for her father: a witty, magnetic man who taught her to “see the beauty” in everything, even as he dismantled his family’s lives with every drink.

This is not a tale of redemption. It’s an unflinching portrait of how addiction consumes a person and a family. Calon writes with clarity about the addict’s inherent selfishness while painting a deeply compassionate portrait of a cherished parent, all in sparkling, vivid prose. I cried reading it because it felt painfully, recognisably true. If you've ever watched someone you love vanish into addiction, this book will cut close to the bone. It did for me.