Basil Street Blues

Holroyd, Michael

ISBN 10 : 0393321746 ISBN 13 : 9780393321746

Editeur : W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

Basil Street Blues Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd assumed his family was perfectly English, or at least ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past yields clues to startling events and eccentric characters. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir. 16 pp photos.

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography for A Strange Eventful History

Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own family's history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives.

Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences.

These two volumes - published together for the first time here - form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.

'Fine, funny and touching...[Basil Street Blues is] an original, unforgettable book' Victoria Glendinning, Daily Telegraph

'Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work...a classic piece of English autobiography' D. J. Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

Revue de presse :

"Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work...a classic piece of English autobiography" (D. J. Taylor Times Literary Supplement)

"Fine, funny and touching...[Basil Street Blues is] an original, unforgettable book" (Victoria Glendinning Daily Telegraph)

"A brilliant writer blessed with prefect pitch...there could be no more sympathetic and funny companion with whom to go into the jungle of genealogy than Holroyd" (Mail on Sunday)

"Michael Holroyd is one of the greatest biographers of our age... [Mosaic] is an absolute tour de force of brilliant writing" (Lynn Barber Daily Telegraph)

"[Mosaic] is marvellous because the autobiographer is in fact a master-biographer" (Diana Athill Literary Review)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: W. W. Norton & Company
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393321746
• ISBN 13: 9780393321746
• Reliure: Livre broché
• Nombre de pages: 342