Stories about pets are a source of delight, along with stories about parents, in two gripping family memoirs - each touching and funny in roughly equal measure - published in the past few weeks. In The Smoking Diaries (Granta Books, £12.99) playwright Simon Gray tells of his much-loved cat, Jeffry, who goes missing and is found weeks later in the care of a pair of retired teachers he'd followed home one day. "He greeted us with a pleasant enough purr," reports Gray, "though he seemed half drugged with sloth and luxury" in a large basket, around which were saucers full of milk, fish and chicken.

A mission of mercy on behalf of his cat-crazy mother is described by the novelist and biographer Tim Jeal in Swimming With My Father (Faber and Faber, £12.99). Her beloved Smudge is lying dead in a gutter, and she can't bring herself to retrieve and bury her. Tim does the deed, and is greatly surprised when his dad phones later to report Smudge sitting on her grave. "It's like the Resurrection," he says. "I am afraid you have just buried a complete stranger," adds mum.

Common to both these excellent books is an affecting recognition that all things must pass. After the death of his father (the Christian mystic and swimmer at the centre of the book), Tim Jeal finds a photograph of him as a 15-year-old. "Gazing at this attractive boy who had possessed my father's might-have-beens, I seemed to catch a glimpse of the mystery governing all our destinies."

Mr Gray ends his book with a photograph of himself aged eight, with his older brother Nigel behind him and his younger brother, Piers, then six months, nestling in his lap. By then, besides learning of the deleterious effect of alcohol (four bottles of Veuve Clicquot a day until he quit) on Gray's own body, we have endured a graphic description of Piers's messy death through his addiction to it. The book's brilliant closing sentences relate to another photograph of Nigel and him, aged three and four: "We're both sitting on the back of a Great Dane, her name was Sarah -- no, Sari - she used to trot us about the garden, sometimes out of the garden and down the road a way, and look -- who is this? Yes, who is this?" (This evidence of Gray's innate sense of poetry, incidentally, makes one wonder why he is so literal-minded -- and unfair - in his approach to Auden.)

I called The Smoking Diaries a 'family memoir', which is not a description used by its author. But there is certainly much more in the book about family (and indeed friends) than there is about smoking (60 a day over nearly as many years and still going . . . well, still going - just). We find Gray at home in Holland Park, on holiday in Barbados and Italy, wittily, if somewhat grumpily, observing what is happening around him, while looking back, with a degree of self-deprecation, on an up-and-down sort of life in a loose prose whose stream-of-consciousness style appears to have infected this review. The valedictory tone is reinforced by accounts of the death from cancer of his friend Ian Hamilton and the attack of the disease on himself and his friend Harold Pinter. (Not for the first time, Pinter and Lady Antonia emerge as rather preposterous people, with their intimate suppers -- enlivened by Pinter's political outbursts -- at a restaurant called Chez Moi, whose own eventual demise is a source of sadness too.)

With little space left for Swimming With My Father, let me simply urge readers not to miss this superbly written book.

Christopher Gray