Editions

Lost Years

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099283249

  • Length: 432  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 26mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 299g

  • RRP: £13.99

Lost Years

  • A Memoir 1945 - 1951

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099283249

  • Length: 432  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 26mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 299g

  • RRP: £13.99

Reviews

  • Isherwood's account is endearingly honest... a journal not only unusually objective but in parts shockingly frank. You are left feeling you have truly got to know Christopher Isherwood... A welcome supplement to Isherwood's Diaries and provides futher insight into a major literary figure

    Scotland on Sunday

  • In Lost Years Isherwood lays bare his mid-life crisis with critical self-candour, never losing his engaging manner nor his sense of humour... His diaries are the basis for all his creative work, and Lost Years is the most revealing so far

    Harpers & Queen

  • Positively compulsive

    Sunday Telegraph

  • Isherwood remains a curious and memorable writer... A master of translucent prose, the events and people of these years seem to be described by a narrator as perceptive as he is unobtrusive

    The Times

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About the Author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

Christopher Isherwood

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Features

Releasing The Animals: bringing Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy's relationship to life

Katherine Bucknell edited The Animals, a collection of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy's love letters. She charts the journey to bringing them to life in a podcast starring Simon Callow and Alan Cumming

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