Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir: 1935-1975 - Hardcover

Lodge, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846559502 ISBN 13: 9781846559501

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2015

Synopsis

A memoir from one of Britain's greatest novelists and critics, showing how his childhood and early career led to him becoming the writer of Changing Places, Small World and The Art of Fiction.
     'I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England...' The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, who got his artistic genes from his musician father and his Catholic faith from his Irish-Belgian mother, David Lodge was four when World War II began and grew to maturity through decades of great social and cultural change, giving him plenty to write about in his distinguished career.
     In this memoir of his life up to the publication of his breakthrough book, Changing Places, David looks back over his childhood and youth, including his undergraduate years at University College London, where he met Mary, his future wife, in freshers' week. After National Service, and two years' postgraduate research, married at last and soon a father, he struggles to make a start as both novelist and academic, until a lucky break brings him a job at the University of Birmingham and a stimulating friendship with a colleague of similar ambition, Malcolm Bradbury. A promising career anchored on a happy marriage opens up, full of opportunities for travel, enjoyment of exciting new trends and interesting new friends, but also intertwined with unexpected setbacks and challenges, both professional and personal.
     Candid, witty and insightful, illuminating both the author and his work, Quite a Good Time to be Born gives a fascinating picture of a period of transition in British society and the evolution of a writer who has become a classic in his own lifetime.

About this title

About the Author

DAVID LODGE's novels include The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, How Far Can You Go? (1980), which was Whitbread Book of the Year, Small World (1984), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Nice Work (1988), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, Thinks... (2001), Author, Author (2004) and, most recently, A Man of Parts (2011). He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction (1992), Consciousness and the Novel (2002) and The Year of Henry James (2007). His works have been translated into 25 languages. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham and continues to live in that city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded a CBE for services to literature and is also a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Review

"What one takes away from this half-memoir is the self-portrait of an extraordinarily good, wrongly modest man; a distinguished scholar, and one of the finest of current novelists" -- John Sutherland Spectator "As a piece of reportage from the third quarter of the English 20th century this is a sociologist's paradise" Guardian "An outstanding memoir... Lucid and witty" Irish Times "A fascinating and moving read" Financial Times "Quite a Good Time to be Born is a record of success, free of boasting or malice. Anyone with some knowledge of academia or the literary world will find it full of interest" -- Allan Massie Scotsman

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1846559502
• ISBN 13: 9781846559501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496