Published in 2017
320 pages
Rebecca Stott is a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, the novels The Coral Thief and the national bestseller Ghostwalk, and a biography, Darwin and the Barnacle. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio and lives in Norwich.
What is this book about?
A father-daughter story that tells of the the author’s experience growing up in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist, separatist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk.
Rebecca Stott was born a fourth-generation Brethren and she grew up in England, in the Brighton branch of the Exclusive Brethren cult in the early 1960s. Her family dated back to the group’s origins in the first half of the nineteenth century, and her father was a high-ranking minister. However, as an intelligent, inquiring child, Stott was always asking dangerous questions and so, it turns out, was her father, who was also full of doubt. When a sex scandal tore the Exclusive Brethren apart in 1970, her father pulled the family out of the cult. But its impact on their lives shaped everything before and all that was to come.
The Iron Room (named for the windowless meeting houses made of corrugated iron where the Brethren would worship) is Stott’s attempt to understand and even forgive her father: a brilliant, charismatic, difficult, and at times cruel man who nonetheless inspired his daughter with his love of literature, film, and art and with his passion for life.
