Author(s): Alexei Sayle

Biographies & Memoirs

Alexei Sayle was born in Liverpool on the day egg rationing came to an end. Alexei always knew his parents were different. They ate salad. And they read the Soviet Weekly. They also travelled. They travelled to northern seaside towns to attend AGMs. And they travelled across Europe. Determined to see Communism in action, they travelled to Czechoslavkia, where they visited the sites of massacres and ate strange smelling sausages. Life was often confusing. As the sixties took hold, Alexei tried hitchhiking and protesting and being cool but more or less missed the Beatles and the Liverpool poets. And he often found his mother at the same parties. While arguing was a way of life at home, it finally meant he was expelled from school. Thinking it might be time he became a painter, the book ends with him poised to start art-college. Whether talking about his mother's obsession with boiled eggs, his father's illness, the last tram or the unusual piece of furniture that was the Secretol, STALIN ATE MY HOMEWORK is a brilliantly funny and perceptive portrait of a family, a city, a country and a continent going through enormous changes.