Siblings tend to play little part in family memoirs that focus on parents. Most memoirists write as if they are only children. Perhaps this is unsurprising; siblings’ memories of childhood rarely correspond. As Robert Gray observes in his autobiography The Land I Came Through Last (2008), ‘the one in the family who is going to be a writer is always an only child’.

It is fascinating, therefore, when siblings collaborate on a memoir about their upbringing. Sunshine and Shadow: A Brothers’ Story is collaborative autobiography in both senses of the term: the telling of the story is shared between two brothers, James and Stephen Dack (with occasional input from their only sister, Alison), while the memoir is ghost-written by the journalist and biographer Larry Writer. The latter has done a fine job cobbling together countless hours of interviews with the Dack brothers into a mostly seamless and engaging narrative.