Seven years before the Great War, a little boy stays overnight with his family on an uncle's Shropshire farm. They are on their way to Liverpool to board the ship to Canada, to start a brand new life.
He awakes the next morning, full of excitement and anticipation. But he awakes to an empty house- empty, except for his new guardian. His mother, father and siblings have packed up and gone. He has been left behind, in what turns out to be a heartbreaking betrayal. This ten-year-old child was Geoffrey - Richard Madeley's grandfather.
The shock waves would ripple down through generations of Madeley boys to come, each one destined to become a father to a son, each struggling to cope with a tangled emotional inheritance. Christopher, Geoffrey's son, was starved of paternal affection; his father, deprived of parenting role models, had emotionally withdrawn. Christopher, who was packed off to a bleak and desolate boarding school, swore to himself that if he had a son, things would be different. But were they? And when Richard was born, a child of the 1960s, did the psychological scars of the past make their mark on the present? What kind of a father did Richard himself become?
Fathers & Sons is a fascinating journey into the very heart of fatherhood as seen through the eyes of four ordinary men living through one of the most rapidly changing centuries in history. Not merely the story of one family, it is also a uniquely compelling exploration of the meaning of fatherhood itself.