Love Child

A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

By: Allegra Huston

Narrated by: Allegra Huston

Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Bloomsbury presents Love Child by Allegra Huston, read by Allegra Huston.

When Allegra Huston was four years old, her mother was killed in a car crash. Soon afterwards, she was introduced to an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke - the legendary film director John Huston - with the words ‘This is your father'.

So began an extraordinary odyssey: from the magical Huston estate in Ireland, to the Long Island suburbs, to a hidden paradise in Mexico - and, at the side of her older sister, Anjelica, into the hilltop retreats of Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal and Marlon Brando. Allegra's is the penetrating gaze of an outsider never quite sure if she belongs in this rarefied world and of a motherless child trying to make sense of her famous, fragmented family. Then, at the age of 12, Allegra's precarious sense of self is shattered when she is, once more, introduced to her father - her real one, this time, the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich.

At the heart of Love Child is Allegra's search through the unreliable certainties of memory for the widely adored mother she never knew - the ghost who shadowed her childhood and left her in a web of awkward and unwelcome truths. With clear-eyed tenderness, Allegra tells of how she forged bonds with both her famous fathers, transforming her mother's difficult legacy into a hard-won blessing.

Beautifully written and forensically honest, Love Child is a seductive insight into one of Hollywood's great dynasties and the story of how, in a family that defied convention, one woman found her balance on the shifting sands of conflicting loyalties.

©2009 Allegra Huston (P)2020 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"This extraordinary book reveals the all but unendurable sorrow of loss and the difficulties of those unwilling to live in a world without love. Because Huston's concerns are with what she has seen and learned, rather than with alienation and the affixing of blame, her memoir glimmers with triumphant wisdom." (Susanna Moore)

"A fascinating and profoundly moving exploration of family secrets. Poignant, inspiring and beautifully written, an intriguing first-hand account of growing up inside a world the rest of us can only read about." (Joanna Briscoe)

"A touching glimpse of the pain and longing felt by a child who doesn't quite belong to anyone, this unsentimental journey through the star-studded vacuum of her various families is unexpectedly tender and forgiving. She writes with an artist's eye for detail, with the clear gaze of a small outsider, searching forever for love." (Joanna Lumley)