A Life and a Half

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS 2025

The gripping, remarkably candid story of one man’s unorthodox life before politics, from Labour minister and Sunday Times-bestselling author Chris Bryant

‘Charming, unexpected, honest’ RORY STEWART
‘One of the handful of sitting MPs who can genuinely write . . . A terrific book, funny, frank and moving in equal measure’ FINANCIAL TIMES

Before he was a politician, Chris Bryant was an Anglican priest, baptising babies and holding the hands of the dying. Before that, he manned the barricades in Latin America, and before that, he was the scared son of an alcoholic mother and an estranged father.

This is a no-holds-barred account of a minister’s truly unconventional life before politics – one that has left Bryant equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay clubs, on the hustings or the stage. With characteristic frankness, he recounts growing up in General Franco’s Spain, acting alongside some of the most talented names of the day as a teenager, and caring for his brother and mother as she descended into addiction. He ran the family home from sixteen, became ordained at twenty-four and came out as gay shortly after. And that’s just the early years.

A Life and a Half tells a gripping story of bishops and actors, drag queens and pushy candidates, stuffed with moments of joy and hilarity and sorrow and abuse. All while tracking the landscape of late-twentieth-century British politics, from Thatcher to the birth of New Labour. It is a memoir like no other.