Mr Norris Changes Trains

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On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris.

This chance encounter ignites a close friendship between the two Englishmen, one that draws Bradshaw into the seedier quarters of the city. Here Norris runs a dubious import–export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, his creditors and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni. Yet there is something mildly sinister about Norris himself. Bradshaw’s new companion is a man of contradictions: heavily in debt but extraordinarily lavish, excessively polite but sexually deviant. Ultimately, Norris is a man who can’t outrun his secrets.

‘A masterpiece in comic portraiture’ Guardian

‘Radiant prose rhythm married to the most delicious dialogue’ Sebastian Barry

‘Isherwood sketches with the lightest of touches the last gasp of the decaying demi-monde and the vigorous world of communists and Nazis, grappling with each other on the edge of the abyss’ Sunday Telegraph

About 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.

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