Basil Street Blues - Hardcover

Holroyd, Michael

3.76

103 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048500 ISBN 13: 9780393048506

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000

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Not long before his parents died in the 1980s, Michael Holroyd asked them to write some account of their early lives. These two documents, which, where they do overlap, differ dramatically - they do not even agree on the date of Michael's birth - market the starting point of the book. A biographer by profession, Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But old photograph albums, papers found in the lining of an evening bag, and crumbling documents in various public record offices gradualy yield clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a long, slow decline from English nobility on one side, and on the other a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry. Fatal fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsumated longings - all of these flow from the pages of his parents' recollections to which he adds his own.

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Review:

"A wonderful offbeat memoir ... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet."

From the Back Cover:

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography for A Strange Eventful History

Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own family's history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives.

Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences.

These two volumes - published together for the first time here - form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.

'Fine, funny and touching...[Basil Street Blues is] an original, unforgettable book' Victoria Glendinning, Daily Telegraph

'Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work...a classic piece of English autobiography' D. J. Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

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