Search results for ""Author Sybille Bedford""

Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, "one of the kindest men I ever met". She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

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This intensely remembered, partly autobiographical novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, describes the childhood of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the wars. When her father dies, she swaps life in a run-down German château for an exhilarating existence with her beautiful, talented and unreliable mother on the French Riviera. Sent away to England for schooling, the gypsy-like Billi ricochets between short-lived tutors and a life of reading, friends and public lectures. Returning to the Mediterranean, her unorthodox education – intellectual, emotional and sexual – continues among the vibrant community of artists, exiles and intellectuals who have colonised the coast, coaxing her towards a life of literature.

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Sybille Bedford's first novel, A Legacy is a savage indictment of the brutality and anti-Semitism spawned in German officer-cadet schools, published with an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford depicts their vastly different worlds – the wealthy bourgeois life of the Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation, their personal upheavals and tragedies are set against the menacing backdrop of a newly unified Germany combined with Prussian militarism in the decades before the First World War.Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) was born in Berlin, Germany and educated privately in England, Italy and France. Described by Julia Neuberger as 'the finest woman writer of the 20th century', she is the author of A Favourite of the Gods (1963), Jigsaw (1989) and A Compass Error (1968). She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice-President of PEN. She was awarded the OBE in 1981.If you enjoyed A Legacy, you might like L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'One of the most dazzling practitioners of English prose'— Bruce Chatwin'A joy ... the social and political milieu of a vanished age is brilliantly realised'— Daily Telegraph'Cool, witty, elegant'— Evelyn Waugh'At once historical novel and study of character, a collection of brilliantly objective portraits'— Aldous Huxley

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