The Lifewriter David Constantine by David Constantine 9781771961028, 1771961023, B01G12DH6E instant download after payment.

“The Life-Writer evokes both the rapture and heartache of first love and the windswept loneliness of bereft old age. In its emotional honesty, Mr Constantine also confronts the ambiguities of his own art: The more beguiling the storyteller’s vision, the more harm it can wreak on the experience of reality.”  -  The Wall Street Journal

Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met – a hitchhike through France that he had tried to tell her about in the last few hours of his life. 

Picking her way through bundles of letters and postcards from five decades earlier, Katrin begins to uncover a life she knew nothing of, and an expedition that exceeded anything her professional, biographical subjects ever undertook. ‘Think of me then,’ her husband beseeched her, at the roadside, thumb in the air, gaily setting forth, ‘never forget me then.’ David Constantine’s passionate tale of grief and rediscovery marks only the second foray into novel writing for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim. A great work of literature, he reminds us, is never finished, it is "a living and moving thing, alive in all its parts in every fibre", designed to be inexhaustible and to outlive. As Katrin’s journey proves, the lives of those we love are similarly inexhaustible, they keep on offering up new revelations, possessing the people they leave behind, and forever needing to be rewritten.

"... the beauty of Constantine’s writing lies in his extraordinary patience and precision with every whorl of consciousness, his unabashed fascination with every leaf and branch of the inner life. His emotional intelligence is as abundant as his linguistic gifts and as necessary to the story he’s telling... "  -  The New York Times