A brilliant, beautifully written memoir from Suede founder and lead singer Brett Anderson.

'Coal Black Mornings is excellent: evocative, thoughtful and frank; an instant hit in a minor key. Anderson is particularly good on his unusual upbringing . . . as accomplished a writer of elegant prose as he was of narcotically enhanced lyrics about urban ennui' Neil Armstrong, Mail on Sunday

'Coal Black Mornings is a triumph . . . a bracingly honest work raised way above the celeb book fray by Anderson's obvious talent for writing . . . what he says is revelatory and delivered with writerly panache - as is the rest of this singular memoir, which sends you back to the music, suddenly aware of the wealth of experience that sparked its creation' John Harris, Mojo

'A rich, sad and honest tale' Olivia Cole, GQ

Evening Standard Book of the Year. Observer Book of the Year. Guardian Book of the Year. Sunday Times Book of the Year. Telegraph Book of the Year. New Statesman Book of the Year. Herald Book of the Year. Mojo Book of the Year.

Brett Anderson came from a world impossibly distant from rock star success, and in Coal Black Mornings he traces the journey that took him from a childhood as 'a snotty, sniffy, slightly maudlin sort of boy raised on Salad Cream and milky tea and cheap meat' to becoming founder and lead singer of Suede.

Anderson grew up in Hayward's Heath on the grubby fringes of the Home Counties. As a teenager he clashed with his eccentric taxi-driving father (who would parade around their council house dressed as Lawrence of Arabia, air-conducting his favourite composers) and adored his beautiful, artistic mother. He brilliantly evokes the seventies, the suffocating discomfort of a very English kind of poverty and the burning need for escape that it breeds. Anderson charts the shabby romance of creativity as he travelled the tube in search of inspiration, fuelled by Marmite and nicotine, and Suede's rise from rehearsals in bedrooms, squats and pubs. And he catalogues the intense relationships that make and break bands as well as the devastating loss of his mother.

Coal Black Mornings is profoundly moving, funny and intense - a book which stands alongside the most emotionally truthful of personal stories.