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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 'An intense, succulent read that's intermittently dazzling' THE TIMES 'Chilling, exquisitely moving' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A superb memoir - and one of the best books on addiction I have ever read' EVENING STANDARD A. A. Gill's memoir begins in the dark of a dormitory with six strangers. He is an alcoholic, dying in the last-chance saloon. He tells the truth - as far as he can remember it - about drinking and about what it is like to be drunk. He recalls the lost days, lost friends, failed marriages ... But there was also an 'optimum inebriation, a time when it was all golden'. Sobriety regained, there are painterly descriptions of people and places, unforgettable musings about childhood and family, art and religion; and most movingly, the connections between his cooking, dyslexia and his missing brother. Full of raw and unvarnished truths, exquisitely written throughout, POUR ME is about lost time and self-discovery. Lacerating, unflinching, uplifting, it is a classic about drunken abandon.
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'His mind, officially measured as off the Mensa scale, is an object of wonder. But it swivels everywhere like a dropped high-pressure hosepipe . . . Gill is explosive. God knows what a frightening thing he must have been in drink. He is bad enough as a dry drunk, the kind of sober person who gets thrown out of restaurants (in his case, Gordon Ramsay's). But the end of the book dwells on a recently evolved philanthropic side to Gill's character. He has become very anxious about the world. He travels to awful places, eloquently and genuinely compassionate with the suffering he witnesses there ... One deduces that he has transcended his suffering but he now has a hypersensitive sympathy with the suffering of others. A A Gill is 61, 30 years sober and surviving. Those who admire him (and I am one) will not merely read him over the years to come but follow him wherever he is now going. It will, one guesses, be an interesting journey' John Sutherland NEW STATESMAN
