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Dadland is a thrilling book about how a daughter tries to make sense of her father's life and she spends years patiently collecting the details. It covers many aspects including her own growing up, his dementia and how she and her family cared for him, family crises and the father's wartime service as a Jedburgh in France and Burma.

It does not necessarily follow a chronological pattern and this helps because the present often helps to understand the past and the past shines light on the future .Keggie Carew's writing is superb and you can feel her agonies and joys. Her description of her father's wartime experiences behind enemy lines in both France and Burma are so exciting and the latter campaign - the so-called 'forgotten war' - is described as well as I've ever read.

How her father is unable to settle into post-war life and find a job and the effect that this has on his family is wonderfully told, as well perhaps in the classic movie The Best Years of Our Lives. And the periods of dementia, to see a war hero, youngest ever Lieutenant Colonel and holder of the DSO, reduced to helplessness by this awful disease, tears the reader apart. Fantastic.

David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen and Two Families at War, all published by Sacristy Press.