The Arms of the Infinite: Elizabeth Smart and George Barker

"A moving account of a man returning to his child self, trying to understand his absconding father, and of an adult searching to forgive."---Rosemary Sullivan, author of By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, a Life

"One of the pleasures of this memoir is to see how the work of Elizabeth Smart still thrives; it is heartening to witness Christopher Barker consort with his mother's words and add a cool quantity of his own, finally getting a word in, one might say, in a conversation that cancelled the children too many times."---Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books

"This book is enormously loving and forgiving: a really honest tribute to his creative and wayward parents; an important record of their turbulent times and now one of my favourite books."---Fiona Green, Camden New Journal

The Arms of the Infinite takes the reader inside the minds of author Christopher Barker's parents, writer Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept) and poet George Barker. From their first fateful meeting and subsequent elopement, Barker candidly reveals their obsessive, passionate, and volatile love affair.

He writes evocatively of his unconventional upbringing with his siblings in a shack in Ireland and, later, a rambling, falling-down house in Essex. Interesting and charismatic figures from the literary and art worlds are regular visitors, and the book is full of faseinating cameos and aneedotes.

Primarily a photographer, Christopher Barker is also a writer, whose article Life at Tilty Mill, featured in Granta magazine (2002), formed the basis for this book. Arms of the Infinite was first published in the United Kingdom in 2006.