In A Runaway Life, the sequel to A Horse in my Suitcase, and Pom's Odyssey, John Holman's two memoirs of his youth in West Sussex, England and his emigration to Australia, he's a few years older but no more settled.
He's still trying to find his way into a career and a permanent home, only now he's courting Martha, his American girlfriend, and traveling peripatetically between England, Australia and the United States.
A Runaway Life contains the same brand of often madcap adventure and humor, with Holman poking fun at his own foibles and false starts, but the memoir also contains pathos - the death by suicide of his father and his mother-in-law's struggle with a malignant cancer.
This is life in all its strange arrivals and departures, triumphs and tragedies.
Brian Tanguay – California Review of Books
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