Awards
- Short-listed for Independent Booksellers' Week Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2009
- Shortlisted for Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award: Adults 2009.
- Shortlisted for Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2009.
- Shortlisted for Independent Booksellers' Week Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2009.
- Winner of Costa Book Award 2008
- Winner of Costa Novel Award 2008
- Winner of Costa Novel Award 2008.
- Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards 2016.
Overview
Hailed as “a virtuoso exercise” (Sunday Telegraph), this book reflects candidly, sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old. Charming readers, writers, and critics alike, the memoir won the Costa Award for Biography and made Athill, then ninety-one, a surprising literary star. Diana Athill was one of the great editors in British publishing. For more than five decades she edited the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. As a writer, Athill made her reputation for the frankness and precisely expressed wisdom of her memoirs. Writing in her ninety-first year, ""entirely untamed about both old and new conventions"" (Literary Review) and freed from any of the inhibitions that even she may have once had, Athill reflects candidly, and sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old—the losses and occasionally the gains that age brings, the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. Distinguished by ""remarkable intelligence...[and the] easy elegance of her prose"" (Daily Telegraph), this short, well-crafted book, hailed as ""a virtuoso exercise"" (Sunday Telegraph) presents an inspiring work for those hoping to flourish in their later years.
Full Product Details
Author: Diana Athill
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 21.10cm
Weight: 0.202kg
ISBN: 9780393338003
ISBN 10: 0393338002
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 07 December 2009
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Life, not death, is her preoccupation...Reflections on old age, rather than on a long life lived are rare...It is rarer still for a woman to write such a book: so Athill's candor and economic prose on religion, regrets, and sex are invigorating. -- Emma Jacobs
Unusually appealing. . . . To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well. --Michael Dirda
Author Information
After a distinguished career as a book editor, Diana Athill (1917—2019) won the National Book Critics Circle and Costa Biography Awards for her New York Times best-selling memoir Somewhere Towards the End. In January 2009, she was presented with an Order of the British Empire.
