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Here in notebooks that were never intended for publication, Simenon reflects on his life in some of the most candid revelations ever written. He reflects on his past – his childhood in Liege, the wild parties in Paris and travels around the world – and also examines his motivations and his attitude to work.
A selection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and important letters has been collected together to give us a full, living portrait of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch struggling with difficult philosophical issues, often unsure of herself intellectually; we witness her anguish as a mature writer when a novel won’t come together; we see her reflecting on the intricacies of human relationships; we see her fulminating about world events and exploring spirituality. They also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity: her sharp sense of humour, her irreverence, her emotional hunger and her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable.
Trained first as a pilot, then as a journalist, Frederick Forsyth finally turned to fiction and became one of the most lauded thriller writers of our time. As exciting as his novels, Forsyth’s autobiography is a candid look at an extraordinary life lived to the full, a life whose unique experiences have provided rich inspiration for thirteen internationally bestselling thrillers.
When his widowed father – once a high court judge and always a formidable figure – drifted into vagueness if not dementia, Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship. An entertaining reflection on families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity, ‘Kid Gloves’ is also necessarily a book about the writer himself and the implausible, long-delayed moment when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation.
2015 will mark the centenary of Saul Bellow’s birth as well as the 10th anniversary of his death. ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’ by Zachary Leader is the first biography since the author’s death and the first to discuss his life and work in its entirety. Leader has been granted unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material and has conducted interviews with Bellow’s relatives, close friends, colleagues and lovers. The first volume spans the period from Bellow’s birth in 1915 in Lachine, Canada, to the publication of ‘Herzog’ in 1964.
The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, who got his artistic genes from his musician father and his Catholic faith from his Irish-Belgian mother, David Lodge was four when World War II began and grew to maturity through decades of great social and cultural change, giving him plenty to write about in his distinguished career. In this memoir of his life up to the publication of his breakthrough book, ‘Changing Places’, David looks back over his childhood and youth, including his undergraduate years at University College London, where he met Mary, his future wife, in freshers’ week. After National Service, and two years’ postgraduate research, married at last and soon a father, he struggles to make a start as both novelist and academic, until a lucky break brings him a job at the University of Birmingham and a stimulating friendship with a colleague of similar ambition, Malcolm Bradbury.
Bringing the destruction of a war-torn Europe to life, ‘The World of Yesterday’ is Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s final work, posted to his publisher the day before his tragic death.
With her sharp eye for human foibles and unfailing sense of humour, Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation’s best-loved poets. Now, thanks to this carefully curated prose collection consisting of a lifetime of published and unpublished work, readers can finally meet the Enid-Blyton-obsessed schoolgirl, the ambivalent daughter, the amused teacher, the sensitive journalist, the cynical romantic, the savagely funny television critic.
1996. Joanna Rakoff takes a job at one of New York’s oldest literary agencies. On her first day, her boss gives her a stern talk about someone named ‘Jerry’. She is never to give out Jerry’s address or phone number, or talk to reporters about Jerry, or to call him with questions. It is only then she notices an entire wall of books containing myriad editions of the works of J.D. Salinger. Filled with titanic personalities and legendary authors, ‘My Salinger Year’ is a vivid, funny and charming coming of age story about a young woman trying to find her feet, and her voice.
John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him – an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford’s oldest English literature professorship. He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets – Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney – and his 40-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.
‘In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts’. Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in ‘Winter Journal’, Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world. From his baby’s-eye view of the man in the moon to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, ‘Report from the Interior’ charts Auster’s moral, political and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the post-war fifties and into the turbulent 1960s.
‘You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed …’ Julian Barnes’s new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as ‘an unparalleled magus of the heart’. This book confirms that opinion.
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