Editions

Rosie

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784708016

  • Length: 224  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 171g

  • RRP: £9.99

Rosie

  • Scenes from a Vanished Life

*The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller*

Rose Tremain (or Rosie as she was then) grew up in post-war London – a city still partly in ruins, where both food and affection were fiercely rationed.

But when she is ten years old, everything changes. She loses her father, her house, her school, her friends and is dispatched to a freezing boarding-school in Hertfordshire. Slowly though, the teenage Rosie escapes from the cold world of the Fifties, into a place of inspiration and friendship, where a young writer is suddenly ready to be born.

‘An evocative, unflinching memoir...electric’ Mail on Sunday

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784708016

  • Length: 224  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 171g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • "Rose Tremain famously eschews autobiographical material in her fiction, so this account of her childhood feels so fresh it stings… [she] brings her formidable talent for characterisation to bear on the vanished, culpable cast of her childhood"

    Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times, **Books of the Year**

  • "Rose Tremain manages to fit more wisdom, more unforgettable scenes, more illuminating recollections, into this 194-page memoir than other writers do in memoirs three times the length. A book as nourishing, but concise as this makes you wonder why other writers have to be so long-winded ... For anyone who loves Tremain's novels this memoir is a vital companion"

    Ysenda Maxton Graham, The Times

  • "Intriguing and moving ... So much more alert and open and alive than so many slightly disappointing memoirs by otherwise great writers ... Rosie is a work of self-discovery in the best possible sense of the word - it pulls you in, unsettles, comforts and exhilarates and, finally, makes you see your life anew"

    Julie Myerson, The Spectator

  • "Rose Tremain turns to non-fiction for the first time with this lyrical account of her life up to the age of 18 ... The evocation of 1950s schoolgirldom, with all its emotions, elations and smells, is wonderfully vivid - distinctive, like being donated a set of dreams ... A quiet drama, but as you'd expect it's the writing that makes this book such a delight"

    Claire Harman, Evening Standard

  • "A beautifully written ode to the tenacity of our younger selves"

    Francesca Brown, Stylist

More from this Author

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About the Author

Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country). Her most recent novel, The Gustav Sonata, was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. It won the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the South Bank Sky Arts Award in the UK and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes. www.rosetremain.co.uk

Rose Tremain

Related articles

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Features

Sacred Country: a novel ahead of its time

The activist Peter Tatchell on Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country, a groundbreaking novel about a young country girl called Mary who becomes a man named Martin
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Extracts

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

Read an extract from the masterful new novel by Rose Tremain, which traces a friendship across a lifetime
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Podcasts

May Podcast: MEN with Rose Tremain, Rebecca Asher, Juno Dawson and David Szalay

A wide-ranging and provocative discussion with Rebecca Asher and Juno Dawson is accompanied by interviews with David Szalay and Rose Tremain as we look at how novels and non-fiction are examining the modern male.

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