Book description
'Melvyn Bragg has added another formidable chapter to one of the most
distinguished literary series of recent times' David Robson, Sunday
Telegraph It was not love at first sight. It proved to be not much of a
conversation...Nothing should have come of it. A passionate but
ultimately tragic love affair starts when two students - one French, one
English - meet at university at the beginning of the sixties. From its
tentative early stages, the relationship develops into a life-changing
one, whose profound impact continues to reverberate forty years later.
'A powerful novel that communicates difficult emotional truths. Yet its
dark themes are balanced by the vivid portrait it paints of 1960s
London' Melvyn Bragg's first novel, FOR WANT OF A NAIL, was published
in 1965 and since then his novels have included THE HIRED MAN, for which
he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, WITHOUT A CITY WALL, winner of
the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, CREDO, THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE and THE
SOLDIER'S RETURN, which was published to huge critical acclaim in 1999
and won the WHSmith Literary Award. He has also written several works of
non-fiction including SPEAK FOR ENGLAND, an oral history of the
twentieth century, RICH, a biography of Richard Burton, ON GIANTS'
SHOULDERS, a history of science based on his BBC radio series, THE
ADVENTURE OF ENGLISH, 12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, IN OUR TIME and
THE SOUTH BANK SHOW: FINAL CUT. He was born in 1939 and educated at
Wigton's Nelson Thomlinson School and at Oxford where he read history.
He is President of the National Campaign for the Arts, and in 1998 he
was made a life peer. He won an Academy Fellowship at the BAFTA
Television Awards in 2010.
