A Life and a Half cover art

A Life and a Half

The Unexpected Making of a Politician

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

A Life and a Half

By: Chris Bryant
Narrated by: Chris Bryant
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £15.27

Buy Now for £15.27

Bloomsbury presents A Life and a Half, written and read by Chris Bryant

‘Charming, unexpected, honest’ RORY STEWART

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

‘It is often said that the politicians of today have no hinterland, but then along comes Chris Bryant with a fascinating, frank, funny and moving account of how he became one’ REVEREND RICHARD COLES

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.©2025 Chris Bryant (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Politicians Politics & Activism Funny
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

Critic reviews

This absorbing memoir is the kind of book those who bemoan career politicians will love – it stops when Chris Bryant becomes the MP for Rhondda in 2001. Instead, it focuses on his formative years growing up with an alcoholic mother and absent father, suffering sexual abuse, and being ordained into the priesthood. A Life and a Half is perceptive, revealing and full of suppressed trauma, but it can also take on the quality of a mischievous confessional, particularly when recounting wild times in Latin American Christian ministries. Unorthodox but beguilingly human (Ben East)
Bryant is one of the handful of sitting MPs who can genuinely write. As you’d expect, A Life and a Half is a terrific book, funny, frank and moving in equal measure. It is not just a story of changing careers: in many ways it is a story of coming to terms with yourself . . . Although it is not a political memoir, it is in many ways the story of how Bryant went from a boy unable to speak to one of Parliament’s most eloquent MPs. We can only hope that we might one day get an account of everything that has happened to Bryant in the 21st century that is half as good as this book (Stephen Bush)
Startling . . . Filled with a litany of Bryant’s eye-popping escapades (Mark Paul)
Charming, unexpected, honest (RORY STEWART)
This is a riveting read: self-revelatory, candid about others, and packed with outrageous stories . . . This autobiography is also the story of a man who survived an appalling childhood to lead a varied and worthwhile life as a priest and then politician . . . All told with self-deprecating humour (Richard Harries)
It is often said that the politicians of today have no hinterland, but then along comes Chris Bryant with a fascinating, frank, funny and moving account of how he became one; from young Conservative wannabe actor, Welsh-born, raised in Spain, to Church of England priest, to first out gay Labour MP in Wales. And all before his fortieth birthday (REVEREND RICHARD COLES)
Having previously written several books, including a biography of Glenda Jackson, he has now turned the pen on himself in A Life and a Half. It spans his mother’s alcoholism, his parents’ divorce, the university interlude in which he dabbled with being a member of the Conservative Party, his relationships with women and men, his spell as an Anglican vicar and the liberation of leaving the Church and discovering gay life in London in the 1990s (Francesca Angelini)
An unexpected delight, fearlessly frank, just a little bit scurrilous and full of heart (GRAHAM NORTON)
An MP’s memoir that stops as soon as he actually arrives in parliament, focusing instead on the much more human story of how he got there (Rachel Cunliffe)
All stars
Most relevant
I knew who Bryant was but not much about him beyond the occasional political story. I'd read a couple of his other books though and had really enjoyed them, so I knew he wrote well and mastered his research. This time the research was his own memory and I had no idea of the interesting turns his life had taken. I knew nothing of his Spanish boyhood and, fortuitously, took this book on holiday with me to Spain, where it was a particular delight to listen to.
It was also interesting to see how the various strands of his back story fed into his eventual life in politics. I would enjoy hearing more about his political life over the past decades but I suppose that's unlikely.
A good read.

An unexpected back story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.