The Berlin Novels

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Enter the dark, dazzling world of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin.

Mr Norris Changes Trains, the first of Isherwood's classic Berlin novels, begins with a chance encounter. On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris. So begins a close friendship – yet there is something sinister about Bradshaw’s new companion.

Goodbye to Berlin inspired the musical Cabaret and the play I Am a Camera. Having recently moved to the city, Christopher becomes enamoured with its local denizens and the colourful lives they lead. Yet as Hitler’s shadow grows taller, each of his new acquaintances comes under threat, passing their days in a city, and a world, on the brink of ruin.

‘Brilliant sketches of a society in decay’ George Orwell

‘The Berlin Novels are masterpieces, funny, darkly innocent explorations of a Berlin in the thirties that is now as firmly in the past as Pompeii’ Observer

‘More than any other foreign writer, Isherwood’s fictional autobiography – or autobiographical fiction – has shaped Berlin’ Guardian

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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