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Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met.
After the death of her beloved husband, Katrin, a literary biographer, copes with the loss by writing his personal history. While researching the letters and journals he left behind, however, she comes to the devastating conclusion that his life before their marriage was far richer than the one they shared. To understand and recreate the period of his greatest happiness - hitch-hiking through France as a young man, madly in love with his companion, a French girl named Monique - Katrin embarks on a heartbreaking journey to discover the man she never fully knew.
"Starred Review. The novel is a truthful account of both the physical pain and the mental anguish of grief, and yet the journey remains a hopeful one." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. British writer Constantine, set for greater recognition in the States, presents an intelligent, heartfelt novel about the subjectivity of memory and the inadvertent or purposeful distortion of reminiscence." - Booklist
"This second novel from award- winning short story writer and poet Constantine (Davies) offers a quiet and contemplative portrait of grief and its aftermath. Warmly recommended." - Library Journal
"A flawed but nevertheless haunting (and haunted) novel." - Kirkus
"At its heart ... The Life-Writer turns on the same ideas of love, loss and memory that animate In Another Country and has about it much the same air of tempered suffering. It would, we might expect, be filmed in the same ... manner as 45 Years." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"[Constantine] proves himself yet again one of the greatest analysts of feeling working in fiction today, and one of the most lyrical. The first chapter is so shockingly accomplished that I had to stop, go back and immediately reread it." - The Guardian (UK)
"Here, [Constantine] has a persistent interest in the discarded pieces of other people's lives that can reawaken one's own past, or open up the incommunicable in the present." - Financial Times (UK)
This information about The Life-Writer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and, translator. The title story of his North American debut collection of short fiction, In Another Country: Selected Stories (Biblioasis, 2015) was adapted into the Academy Award–nominated feature film 45 Years. He is the author of one previous novel, Davies, as well as four collections of short stories in the United Kingdom, and five collections of poetry. He lives in Oxford, England, where until 2012 he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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