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Title: Love from Boy

Subtitle: Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother

Author: Donald Sturrock

Narrator: Andrew Wincott, Thomas Judd

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-02-16

Publisher: John Murray

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

On the 100th anniversary of his birth comes a revelatory collection of letters from the nation's favourite storyteller.

'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs....' So begins the first letter that nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding school headmaster.

For most of his life, Roald Dahl would continue to write weekly letters to his mother, chronicling his adventures, frustrations and opinions, from the delights of childhood to the excitements of flying as a World War II fighter pilot and the thrill of meeting top politicians and movie stars during his time as a diplomat and spy in Washington. And, unbeknownst to Roald, his mother lovingly kept every single one of them. Sofie was, in many ways, Roald's first reader. It was she who encouraged him to tell stories and nourished his desire to fabricate, exaggerate and entertain. Reading these letters, you can see Roald practicing his craft, developing the dark sense of humour and fantastical imagination that would later produce such timeless tales as The BFG, Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Witches.

The letters in Love from Boy are littered with jokes and madcap observations, sometimes serious, sometimes tender, and often outrageous. To eavesdrop on a son's letters to his mother is to witness Roald Dahl turning from a boy to a man - and finally becoming a writer.

Members Reviews:

Dearest Mama

Roald Dahl started writing to his much loved widowed mother Sofie Magdalene in 1925 from prep school at the age of nine, and they continue up to his return from America to settle in Great Missenden after which there are gaps, until 1965 two years before Sofie Magdalene died. They show not just the fierce bond between Dahl and his mother, but also his emergence as a writer. (His first children's book James and the Giant Peach was not published until 1961).

Above all, these letters are entertaining: full of jokes, pranks, sharp observations, exuberance and energy. His relationship with Sofie Magdalene as well as deeply loving was clearly robust - Dahl's language is frequently extremely coarse and bawdy, but then his mother had given her reckless, rule-breaking son a motor cycle at the age of 16 and sent his favourite pipes from home for him to smoke at school at Repton.

Prep school was full of tales of escapades - fishing for crayfish to eat and one to put in a boy's bed; the new matron Miss Turner not lasting after she kissed a boy in the wash room. There was constant illness amongst the boys from nose-bleeds to pneumonia, and in one letter Dahl mentions almost in passing that 'poor little Ford died yesterday', following complications from measles, just as Dahl's adored seven year-old daughter would do many years later.