Diana Athill: 10 books

“What a feast. Diana’s work compels me. . . . She’s got her teeth into life!”—Alice Munro Diana Athill is one of our great women of letters. The renowned editor of V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and many others, she is also a celebrated memoirist whose Somewhere Towards the End was a New...

“An invitation to sit a spell with an intractable and witty friend.” —New York Times Book Review What will you remember if you live to be 100? Diana Athill charmed readers with her prize-winning memoir Somewhere Towards the End, which transformed her into an unexpected literary...

"I can remember in detail being hit by my first story one January morning in 1958." So begins literary legend Diana Athill in the preface to Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, a long-overdue collection of her short fiction, stories which were originally published in the 1950s to the 1970s....

Winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and a New York Times bestseller: a prize-winning, critically acclaimed memoir on life and aging —“An honest joy to read” (Alice Munro). Hailed as “a virtuoso exercise” (Sunday Telegraph), this book reflects candidly,...

In Make Believe, Diana Athill, acclaimed author of Instead of a Letter and Stet, remembers her turbulent friendship with Hakim Jamal, a young black convert to the teachings of Malcolm X, whom she met in London in the late 1960s. Despite a desperately troubled youth, he became an eloquent spokesman...

A New York Times Notable Book: This memoir of a career in book publishing “should please anyone who cares about twentieth-century literature” (The Washington Post Book World). For nearly five decades, Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the...

In August 1947, Diana Athill travelled to Florence by the Golden Arrow train for a two-week holiday with her cousin Pen. In this playful diary of that trip, delightfully illustrated with photographs of the period, Athill recorded her observations and adventures — eating with (and paid for by) the...

A classic memoir by the author of the New York Times bestseller Somewhere Towards the End. When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi’s quirks, which at first appeared so charming and sweet, soon revealed a darker side—he...

England, in the mid-fifties. Meg Bailey has always aspired to live a respectable life. With her best friend, Roxane, she moves from secondary school to an un-Bohemian art college in Oxford. Under the watchful eye of Roxanne's mother, Mrs Wheeler, the two girls flourish in Oxfordian society. But Meg...

A remarkable, truthful and vivid recollection of childhood, from the author of Stet, After a Funeral, Don't Look at Me Like That and Instead of a Letter. Here Athill goes back to the beginning in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness - a Norfolk country house, servants,...