Overview

Simon Gray is determined to give up smoking. Really. At last. Can he kick the habit of sixty years? Will he, sometime soon, be able to leave his house without nervously feeling for his two packets of twenty and his two lighters, and add no more singes to his cardigan? As this wonderful, wayward record of Gray's life progresses, these questions are overtaken by much larger ones. What is that lady on the plane to Athens doing with her nose? What was sex like before 1963? Will his name be in lights on Broadway? Why did he leave the bedside of his dying mother? With their combination of comedy and serious reflection, of sharp observation and painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray's diaries have reinvented the memoir form and are destined to become classics of autobiography. The beauty of them lies in Gray's struggle to put a finger on some kind of personal truth. The Last Cigarette takes us to many places - Suffolk, a Greek Island, the Caribbean, New York - but not least to a man's heart.

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9781847080721

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Reviews

- 'A new volume of diaries from Simon Gray is always a rare treat' Evening Standard -'A great achievement, a terrific read, every page crammed with jokes, philosophical observations... Volume III is keenly awaited' Lloyd Evans, Spectator - 'His apparently spontaneous, but I suspect meticulously crafted journals are highly addictive, often wildly funny but also, and this is increasingly the case, deeply moving.... they are works of rare honesty, humanity and wit that are surely destined to be read with pleasure a hundred years from now' Sunday Telegraph - '**** There are few things more enjoyable than reading the diaries of Simon Gray... (they) are very, very, funny.' - Irish mail on Sunday

Author Information

Simon Gray was awarded a CBE in the 2005 New Years Honours list. He is the author of over 30 plays, including Butley (1971), The Common Pursuit (1984) and Cell Mates (1995). He has published several volumes of diaries and memoir including The Smoking Diaries, Enter a Fox and Fat Chance - all published by Granta. He died in 2008.

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