The Life-Writer - Softcover

Constantine, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771961015 ISBN 13: 9781771961011

Publisher: Biblioasis, 2016

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book 2016

An October Indie Next List Great Reads” Pick

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.

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Following the final illness and death of her husband Eric, Katrin—a writer of brief lives of minor figures of European Romanticism—decides to fight against his absence by writing the story of his life. Desperate to know Eric as he had been before she loved him, to fetch his early years into those that she must now face without him—Think of me then, Katrin, Eric told her on his deathbed, never forget me then, that lad gaily assuming the land and its roads and traffic would never be anything but kind—she begins, through letters and diaries and conversations with his childhood friends, to reconstruct a pivotal period of his life, uncovering an early affair Eric had with a Parisian artist. As the young couple's increasingly impossible love rushes toward its devastating conclusion, past and present intermesh in unexpected ways and Katrin begins to understand how that period of Eric's youth impacted Katrin's love for him and the marriage the two of them shared. Passionate, profoundly moving, and lyrically written, The Life-Writer offers up an unforgettably heartbreaking portrait of a brilliant woman who grieves for her beloved by writing what others wouldn't dare: the story of his first true love.

About the Author:

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 UK, including Back at the Spike, Under the Dam, The Shieling, and the winner of the 2013 Frank O’Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. His collections of poetry include Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Collected Poems and Nine Fathom Deep. He is also a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux, and Jaccottet. He lives in Oxford, where until 2012 he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

About this edition

• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1771961015
• ISBN 13: 9781771961011
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256