Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul

Ann Wroe, a renowned biographer and obituarist for The Economist, explores the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page in her memoir, Lifescapes. Through her experiences and those of others, she examines what makes a life and how it lingers after.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2023
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

The acclaimed biographer and obituarist for The Economist reflects on a career spent pursuing life and capturing it on the page.
A FINANCIAL TIMES,SUNDAY TIMES AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023.
Lifescapes is the universe in miniature.
DAILY TELEGRAPH
She's a genius, I believe.
HILARY MANTEL, author of Wolf Hall
What is life?
asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer.
Scientists, too, for all their understanding of how life manifests, thrives, and evolves, have still not plumbed that fundamental question.
Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is.
In this dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation, and poetry, Ann Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page.
Through her experiences and those of others, through people she has known, studied, or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after.
Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty, and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.

Weight: 334g
Dimension: 145 x 226 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787334458