Odd Boy Out: The ’’Hilarious, Eye-Popping, Unforgettable’’ Sunday Times Bestseller

Join the beloved star of Just a Minute, QI, Have I Got News For You and Celebrity Gogglebox, Gyles Brandreth, in his long-waited, moving and hilarious autobiography

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

’Hilarious, ribald, eye-popping, unforgettable, will make you laugh out loud’ Daily Mail
’Staggeringly brilliant, funny and touching, I loved it’ Joanna Lumley
’Warm, witty, charming. A moving and very affectionate family history. An enthusiast for life’The Times
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’I am what my childhood made me’

But what is that exactly, Gyles?
Who are you? And why?

Odd Boy Out is an extraordinarily revealing account of growing up in an apparently well-to-do but always strapped-for-cash middle-class English family. But it is also far more than that.

It is about adventures - meeting princes and presidents, visiting Death Row in America, exploring the sex clubs of Copenhagen. It is a story of a boy blessed with wit, what he got up to, and the people he met growing up in the most wonderful city in all the world in those extraordinary years after the Second World War.

For Odd Boy Out is about more than Gyles and his exploits: it is also a kaleidoscopic portrait of Britain from the 1950s onwards, featuring a cast drawn from politics, the media, swinging London, stage and screen, from Laurence Olivier to Twiggy.

By turns hilarious and moving, and chock full of unforgettable stories, Odd Boy Out is the unexpected and candid autobiography of one of the country’s most unlikely personalities.

Yet at root it is a powerful and passionate exploration of childhood - how our heritage, our parents and our upbringing make us who we are.
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’A whirlwind of witticisms and of funny tales, both short and tall . . . ’I feel I have lived my life in a magic garden where the sun is always shining’ he writes, and in Odd Boy Out he offers us yet another glimpse of that bright, shining sun’ Mail on Sunday

Gyles Brandreth is a writer, broadcaster, veteran of Just A Minute, QI and The One Show, former MP and Government Whip, now Chancellor of the University of Chester and founder of the ’Poetry Together’ project bringing schoolchildren and older people together to learn poetry by heart. His many books include the best-selling poetry anthology, Dancing by the Light of the Moon, and the international best-seller about spelling and punctuation, Have You Eaten Grandma? With Susie Dent, the lexicographer from Countdown, he co-hosts the award-winning podcast, Something Rhymes With Purple. With Dame Sheila Hancock he presents Great Canal Journeys on Channel 4. With Dame Maureen Lipman he is a regular on Celebrity Gogglebox.

Gyles is married to writer and publisher Michèle Brown and has three children, seven grandchildren, and lives in London with his wife, his jumpers, and Nala, the neighbour’s cat.