Marlene Dietrich Lived Here

Second novel from the acclaimed young author of IDIOGLOSSIA.

'Filled with echoes and resonance, intelligence and insight, Bailey's story unfolds the complex, touching failure of brotherly love with a refreshing lack of sentimentality or pretension...A compelling, blackly comic drama of family implosion'

'It is a pleasure to read a writer who makes writing so effortless...There are not many writers who can take as their central theme the Meaning of Life and come up smelling of roses'

'A beautifully written tale of how people create a city and how cities create people. Bailey has crafted a homage to a city that has clearly got under her skin, to produce one that gets under ours too'

Eleanor Bailey is a writer and journalist. She lives in Japan. She has recently been selected as one of twenty-one women writers in the Orange Futures promotion, highlighting the writers to watch in the twenty-first century. Her novels Idioglossia and Marlene Dietrich Lived Here are both published by Black Swan.

For the last 150 years, Berlin has been a city of myth, dreams and possibility. For Erich, it has been home for over two decades. Yet even after two failed marriages and a stuttering career as a artist, he has little to show for it: a pair of dysfunctional children, an agoraphobic girlfriend who believes she is Marlene Dietrich and a worthy but unprofitable café gallery. With the arrival of his younger brother Max, recovering from a suicide attempt, everything changes. Max has always been the golden one for whom success came easily and yet who never cared. Erich's problem is that he always cared too much. 
 
The brothers are at a crossroads, both emotionally and geographically. It is only together that they can claw their way back to life, perhaps through the life and times of Europe's most gilded city . . .

Eleanor Bailey

A clever, dramatic read with a great deal of passion...it crackles with energy

Exuberant...funny and sad and full of human sympathy

Idioglossia: A secret language between a few people, a private language; a lalallation; the babble of babies or the murmur of lunatics. 
 
Bolshy, demanding, eccentric, Great Edie is a Jewish immigrant whose aspirations have always been dampened by reality and whose talents she obscures behind a bristling exterior. Her daughter Grace has been incarcerated in an asylum for most of her adult life following a tragedy from which she never recovers. As a result, Maggie, her only child, is brought up by an alcoholic father on board a cruise liner where, like him, she earns her keep as an entertainer of sorts. Her own daughter, Sarah, is truly dispossessed and, through promiscuous sex, seeks the affection denied to her as a child. 
 
Though disparate, their lives have a curious symmetry: four generations of women who have all been touched by a legacy of madness which they must, in one way or another, confront if they are to achieve fulfilment. Idioglossia is a rich and rewarding novel written with a sparklingly original voice and is destined to establish Eleanor Bailey as one of the most exciting writers of her generation.

Idioglossia

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Praise for Idioglossia

A clever, dramatic read with a great deal of passion...it crackles with energy

Exuberant...funny and sad and full of human sympathy

Books by Eleanor Bailey

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