Down There on a Visit

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Apple Books Bookshop.org ebooks.com Google Play Hive Kobo

Four portraits, four settings, four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood'.

Berlin, 1928. The Greek islands, 1932. London, 1938. California, 1940. Christopher is a tourist, both practically and spiritually, and these are his postcards home. Across the years, he roams restlessly in search of a place to belong and a way of life that is worth living. Which of the guides he encounters will bring meaning to his existence: the businessman, the utopian, the guru or the geisha? As Christopher grapples with the nature of his own future, the world around him marches on relentlessly, toward a future dark with war.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP HENSHER

‘A deeply intelligent and quietly compelling story’ New York Times

‘Radiant with observation, never wasting a word, funny and sympathetic’ New Republic

‘This is the best of Mr Isherwood’s novels’ The Times

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.

Learn more

Details