Iron Man was published by Salt in November 2021.
Iron Man examines lives often overlooked: the lives of working-class men and women, and the disabled. The memoir explores, among many other things, my relationship with my father, a factory worker paralysed by polio.
Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year Award 2022
Biography and Memoir Winner, East Anglian Book Awards 2022.
The judges said the book:
‘brilliantly examines how her father’s disability affected his sense of his own masculinity.’
‘I felt immersed in writer Lynne Bryan’s Iron Man as if the life lived in these pages were mine, and I can’t think of any more profound or valuable service for a memoir to provide. This is a book about bodies and minds, parents and children, men and women, and of what it means in families to care and also to break free – what is normal, and what are the limits of reinvention? Iron Man is about what makes us human, whatever the forces that try to hold us back.’ – Richard Beard, winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize for The Day That Went Missing
‘Iron Man is vivid, precise, visceral, fascinating, and page-turning, really, just thrilling to read. It’s absolutely and distinctively one family’s story, but it also opens up onto a rich slice of cultural history and change. It feels like an incisive record of these last British decades, reaching right back to before the war. It’s so eloquent on class, on place, on work (wonderful!), on feminism, on art, on youth, on illness.’ – Tessa Hadley, Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and 2016 winner of Windham-Campbell Literature prize
‘Iron Man is a brave book, an important book… modern and radical, sometimes uncomfortable but also warm and straightforward. The structure excites and rewards, expanding the story of one family and their experience of disability to cover so much, to connect it to the world, to feminism, to art and writing and the creative process.’ – Emma Healey, winner of Costa First Novel Award for Elisabeth Is Missing