The Teller of Tall Tales: A Survivors' Story

This is not a rags-to-riches story, though that happens.

It's a tale of unlikely connections, outrageous good luck balancing life's challenges, how a neurodivergent boy with ten exam failures, an outside toilet, and a family history reaching back to the Ottoman Empire ended up in the corridors of global power across eighty countries and six decades.

David Sarley's journey takes him from a poor, mixed-race, working-class childhood in East London to encounters with Queen Elizabeth II, President Obama, Bill Gates, and Laurence Olivier, and through one degree of separation, Margaret Thatcher, Nikita Khrushchev, Terence Stamp, Saddam Hussein, and Kevin Bacon, among plenty of other dropped names.

The backdrops are the great struggles of the twentieth century: class, race, the long aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade, the dismantling of Empire, Arab nationalism, communism, capitalism, and Zionism. In telling them, you might notice something of a Marxist perspective, inspired by Groucho and Harpo, as well as their less funny namesake, Karl.

Rooted in a family whose great-uncles served among Iraq's first prime ministers, and carried forward through VSO in Grenada, economic consulting in post-Soviet Russia, and twelve years managing a global health portfolio at the Gates Foundation — this is a book about opened doors, chance encounters, and the communities that carry us further than we have any right to expect.

For anyone interested in family, history, and the colour in everyday lives.