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  • Published: 15 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780552776905
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $30.00

Germs

A Memoir of Childhood





'Destined to become a classic' - Francis Wyndham

The son of affluent parents - a distant, dandified impresario father he revered; a beautiful, mindless 'Gaiety Girl' mother he came to regret loathing - Richard Wollheim grew up in the English suburbia of the 1920s and 1930s. Germs is his account of those years. It is a book like no other; a remarkable exploration of childhood by one of the English-speaking world's most distinguished postwar thinkers.

  • Published: 15 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780552776905
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $30.00

Praise for Germs

'A frighteningly good memoir'

London Review of Books

'Wollheim's powers of description astound...Because of the intensity with which a remarkable man has offered us a view of his inner self, I doubt whether anyone who has read it will forget it'

Literary Review

'Germs is not only elegantly written; it is a human document of considerable power and importance'

Independent

'Pungently truthful, complex and original'

Guardian

'A masterpiece - an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy, boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated'

Spectator