Overview

It’s 1863. The daughter of the most famous writer in the world, Victor Hugo, suddenly leaves her family’s home on the Channel Islands bound for Nova Scotia. She is in pursuit of a young British soldier, with whom she is desperately in love, but who has rejected her. Eight years later, after stalking him to the Caribbean, where he’s stationed with the army, Adèle Hugo is brought back to Paris by a benevolent former slave woman who has taken pity on her. She is admitted to an asylum where she dies decades later, rich from the inheritance of the rights to her father’s books. This story of hopeless love has inspired writers, composers, and a well-known film by François Truffaut. Yet much about Adèle Hugo’s tragic life has remained shrouded in mystery – not least the true character and identity of the soldier who ultimately contributed to her undoing. Mark Bostridge has been obsessed by Adèle’s story for his entire adult life. Now he sets out in pursuit of the truth about her, travelling halfway across the world, acting as sleuth and tracking down the descendants of the soldier she loved. In so doing he recognises the source of his fascination with the aspects of Adèle’s life that reflect and parallel his own. The result is a moving book about the pain of loving too much and of parents loving too little; about the ways in which we are haunted by the dead; and about our insatiable appetite for other’s people’s stories which possess us and invade our own lives. In Pursuit of Love is part memoir and part travelogue, as well as an invigorating new approach to the writing of biography.

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9781399416023

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Reviews

It’s the saddest story ever told - and told so beautifully that you wish it would never end. The author’s search for the truth about Victor Hugo’s daughter carries him across oceans and into the darkest corners of his own past. It’s an unforgettable journey. * Ferdinand Mount, author of Big Caesars and Little Caesars * A haunting and utterly engrossing book – not just a brilliant study of Adele Hugo’s obsessive and unrequited love, but full of revelations about the biographer himself, as he pursues the truth about her life, and finds in the process many parallel truths about his own. * Claire Harman, author of Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart *

It’s the saddest story ever told - and told so beautifully that you wish it would never end. The author’s search for the truth about Victor Hugo’s daughter carries him across oceans and into the darkest corners of his own past. It’s an unforgettable journey. * Ferdinand Mount, author of Big Caesars and Little Caesars *

Author Information

Mark Bostridge won the Gladstone Memorial Prize at Oxford University. He worked for the politician Shirley Williams and at the BBC before becoming a full-time writer. His books include the highly acclaimed biographies, Vera Brittain: A Life, shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the NCR non-fiction Award, and the Fawcett Prize; and Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend, winner of the 2009 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. He has written widely for national newspapers and journals, and appeared on television and radio. He was the consultant on a film version of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, which was produced by Heyday for BBC Films and was released in January 2015.

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