Paperback

A compulsively readable, beautifully written account of a fascinating 20th century woman and life. This candid, affecting portrait of a woman who loathed domesticity explores how she sought to balance a literary career with political commitment. After a lifetime of writing a novel every year, Storm Jameson turned to memoir with this stated ambition: ‘I am trying to write without lying’. The result was an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her childhood, shadowed by a tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and her decision to leave her young son behind while she worked in London; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always marked by the struggle to make money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, a role she used to help refugees escape Nazi Germany.