Louis Nowra, an acclaimed playwright, novelist and screenwriter, never understood why, as a child, his birthday was not celebrated. Only later was he to discover that exactly five years before his birth, his mother killed her father, a Gallipoli was veteran.
In this funny, razor's-edge memoir, Louis Nowra looks back at a fractured family: a beautiful and demanding mother, whose standards could and would never be met by her children or her husbands; a father in love with long-distance; a mad grandmother; a hideous head accident; and a childhood filled with strangeness and obsessions: with a one-armed Dutch girl, flying saucers and aliens, an Italian movie starlet, and the stylish, black American political leader, Adam Clayton-Powell.
'The Twelfth of Never' is a moving and wonderfully original evocation of an unconventional boyhood, of growing up believing that aliens might just walk among us, and of the realisation that to be normal is harder than you think.
