An extraordinary memoir of love, loss and literature from one of Britain's best biographers.
Claire Tomalin is a former Literary Editor at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven highly acclaimed literary biographies, including Samuel Pepys, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and in 2011 the international bestseller Charles Dickens. She is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.
You will find it hard not to be amazed and impossible not to be
moved by the indomitable spirit which drives this memoir...She
comes across like the heroine of a great novel...a hugely
entertaining book
*Guardian*
Absorbing, moving and marvellously written
*Observer*
Her memoir is peppered with fascinating pen portraits and
anecdotes... she has tried, as Pepys did in his life, to give the
'texture' of a life. This she has achieved quite brilliantly
*Sunday Times*
She should be a heroine to modern snowflakes who melt at the first
hurdle. Tomalin is like a glacier: unstoppable, inexorable,
gathering resolve as she goes... The book is poised and beautifully
paced
*Times*
I loved Claire Tomalin's memoir and ate through it in a day when I
was supposed to be doing other things. So interesting and
delightful and charming. I loved how she weaves the big dramatic
events with the everyday - which is so much of what life is.
*Cathy Rentzenbrink, bestselling author of The Last Act of
Love*
She has been tested in ways few women are. Her ability to overcome
adversity may seem discreetly, even austerely handled, but for
Claire Tomalin this memoir is another triumph
*Literary Review*
It is not Tomalin's professional life that impresses most in this
memoir but her survival through personal tragedy, or rather , her
remarkable ability to articulate its bleakness... She speaks from
the heart but retains a sort of privacy, and is all the more
powerful for it
*Evening Standard*
As well as her adventures in literary London as a hack, we also see
a private life of contentment and heartbreak
*The Times Books of the Year*
Ambushingly poignant
*Observer Books of the Year*
There is a truth to every chapter of her recollection
*Observer New Review, Books of the Year*
As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin
had written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now,
she turns to look at her own life
*Guardian Books of the Year*
In this triumph of clear sightedness, Tomalin turns her biographers
searchlight on herself
*Sunday Times Culture Books of the Year*
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