Dimensions
162 x 240 x 41mm
"Angela Carter's life was as rich with incident, as vigorously modern, as unconventional, as dark, and ultimately as tragic as anything in her fiction. A writer of extraordinary inventiveness and range, her work stands out from the great mass of modern English fiction for its bawdiness, linguistic zest, and its hospitality to the fantastic and the absurd. From the pungent fabulism of The Magic Toyshop, through the hard-edged surrealism of The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, to the open-ended picaresque of her last, great comic novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, her oeuvre is characterised by consistently beautiful prose and a joyous faith in the possibilities of literature. Eloquent yet foul-mouthed, consistently humorous yet ferociously opinionated, unconventional, cussed, disarmingly wise, she was a person of phenomenal intellectual energies, enamoured with art and life. This is the first full biography of one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century, that shines a light, too, on Britain's social and cultural history in the second half of the century. Edmund Gordon has spent the past five years researching this fascinating life, even following in her footsteps u travelling to the places she lived in Britain, Japan and the USA, and retracing the journey she made through Siberia in 1971 u to uncover a life rich in incident and adventure."