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A Single Man
  • Published: 4 February 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099541288
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $26.00

A Single Man

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A Single Man is an exclusive Vintage Classic that has been made into a film starring Julianne Moore and Colin Firth and directed by Tom Ford.

George is heartbroken after the death of his lover.

An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George’s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. This short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TOM FORD

‘Lyrical and intensely moving’ Daily Telegraph

‘Widely recognised as his supreme achievement . . . a work of compressed brilliance’ Guardian

‘A virtuoso piece of work . . . powerful’ Sunday Time
  • Published: 4 February 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099541288
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.
portrait photo of Christopher Isherwood

Also by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher and His Kind
Sally Bowles
The Animals
My Guru and His Disciple
The Condor and the Cows
Kathleen and Frank
Lions and Shadows
See all

Praise for A Single Man

His key post-war work. A quarter-century ahead of its time in its portrayal of a quotidian homosexual life, it inspired a generation of gay writers in Britain and the US

Independent

This mix of humour and stoicism in the face of pent-up grief is essential Isherwood

Guardian

His own highly personal form of fiction [is one] in which simple sentences strike a note of great intimacy with the reader as if to a close personal friend, and a sense of total honesty is sought. This style, witty, observant, nostalgic, exact, was Isherwood's great contribution to modern literature

Financial Times

He had dazzling talents as a writer. His literary production was pre-eminent for its wit, humour, charm of style and narrative skill... A Single Man can be almost considered as his masterpiece

Guardian, John Lehmann

The best prose writer in English

Gore Vidal

A testimony to Isherwood's undiminished brilliance as a novelist

Anthony Burgess

One of the best novels of the modern gay liberation movement

Edmund White

A sad, sly report on the predicament of the human animal

New York Times

Lyrical and intensely moving

Daily Telegraph

Angry and affecting

Independent on Sunday

A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful

Sunday Times

Classy

Independent

Very sad and yet at times wildly funny

Daily Telegraph

An absolutely devastating, unnerving, brilliant book

Stephen Spender