The Glass Castle is a memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings survived an upbringing truly stranger than fiction — if it were invented, it would not be credible.

Rex Walls, Jeanette’s father, is a brilliant and charismatic man; a mathematician, a physicist, and an inventor. He is also a brutal, selfish and irresponsible alcoholic. His wife Mary Rose is a painter who detests domestic chores and has an attitude towards her children as robust as her husband’s. ‘Suffering when you’re young is good for you,’ she says, and expects them to find their own food, and fight their own battles. Lori, Brian, Jeannette and Maur- een learn harsh lessons about self- sufficiency from the earliest age imaginable. Being unfed and largely ignored, the children swiftly become wise beyond their years, and a good deal wiser than their parents. It is a family in which the children look on solemnly as their father dangles their mother from an upstairs window.

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