Basil Street Blues and Mosaic

Sep 23, 2024 5:25 AM

Author:Michael Holroyd

As read on BBC Radio 4

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography for A Strange Eventful History and winner of the Lifetime Services to Biography Award.

Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own family's history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives.

Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences.

These two volumes - published together for the first time here - form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.

Reviews

Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work...a classic piece of English autobiography

—— D. J. Taylor , Times Literary Supplement

Fine, funny and touching...[Basil Street Blues is] an original, unforgettable book

—— Victoria Glendinning , Daily Telegraph

A brilliant writer blessed with prefect pitch...there could be no more sympathetic and funny companion with whom to go into the jungle of genealogy than Holroyd

—— Mail on Sunday

Michael Holroyd is one of the greatest biographers of our age... [Mosaic] is an absolute tour de force of brilliant writing

—— Lynn Barber , Daily Telegraph

[Mosaic] is marvellous because the autobiographer is in fact a master-biographer

—— Diana Athill , Literary Review

The latest from this American literary legend is a stark rendition of murder, nervous breakdown, affairs, divorces and much more. It's an incredibly frank and soul-bearing piece of writing which goes some way to explaining the extreme and obsessive nature of Ellroy's brilliant novels

—— Big Issue

Riveting ... this is the most addictive of reads about life, love and self-discovery, in astonishing, soul-baring detail. An unforgettable autobiography

—— Red Magazine

This latest book is Ellroy’s most intimate and personal . . . It’s forceful and unsparing in its revelations . . . [His sentences] make you grateful to read his prose, with its marvelous fury, passion and energy. They also compel you to keep rooting for him

—— San Francisco Chronicle

Crime writer James Ellroy’s most compelling mystery story has always been his own . . . But "The Hilliker Curse" is not meant to be merely a confession. It is an act of creation . . . There’s a truth of feeling in it, too, an underlying sense of what it is actually like to live in the vortex of an impossible yearning . . . Ellroy is expert and relentless at dramatizing the effects [of his obsession]

—— Wall Street Journal

As fascinating as it is at times utterly disturbing

—— Entertainment Weekly

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