SOMEBODY’S SON
By Val & Bev Savage
Independent Publishing Network.
312 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 788 088 701
Somebody’s Son is an unusual book and it’s hard to simply categorise – it’s partly biography, partly ministry memoir, partly family history. Written by Val and Bev Savage (Bev is now busily retired in Bournemouth, but was formerly General Secretary of the FIEC) it tells the story of Bev’s complicated and painful childhood and how, later in his life, he and his first wife Val investigated and came to understand it.
It’s a hard book to review because the circumstances in which the book came about are also very painful. Bev’s wife Val was the driving force behind their investigations into his past and it is her voice that speaks for most of the book. Yet Val died of cancer in 2006, almost in the middle of the story told in the book.