A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity.

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood--the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man--was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. While living in Berlin, he began to write his reputation-making fiction and (with W. H. Auden) plays inspired by the city's nightlife, its artistic underbelly, its fevered politics. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested by the Gestapo. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita.

Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.

A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity.

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood--the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man--was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. While living in Berlin, he began to write his reputation-making fiction and (with W. H. Auden) plays inspired by the city's nightlife, its artistic underbelly, its fevered politics. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested by the Gestapo. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita.

Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.

An intimate portrait of London intellectual life, the breakdown of a marriage and the friendship between two women, 'What You Will' draws the reader into a spellbinding world of beauty and tension.

Gwen, an American painter, lives in London with her English husband, Lawrence, an Oxford don. When Gwen's friend Hilary arrives from New York bruised by a broken engagement, a lost job and an unsuitable love affair, Gwen is determined to find her someone to marry. But will he be another Oxford intellectual, a member of London's bohemia, or a professional from the scandal-ridden New York museum world?

But with Gwen's arrival the bonds of friendship, love, and marriage are severely tested. Pressure builds in the household, affecting Gwen and Lawrence's small son as he struggles to engage with the sophistication and savagery around him.

Tackling deep and unsetttling questions - Are we slaves to our impulses or to one another? Is it possible to have both love and freedom? Can the artist or the intellectual illuminate such questions?, 'What You Will' is a subtly wrought, multi-layered, and hypnotically suspenseful tale about how we handle our most intimate relationships.