Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things that Matter

Description

What matters in the end? In the final years of life, which memories stand out? Writing from her retirement home in Highgate, London, as she approaches her 100th year, Diana Athill recalls in sparkling detail the moments in her life which sustain her. With vivid memories of the past mingled with candid, wise and often very funny reflections on the experience of being very old, Alive, Alive Oh! reminds us of the joy and richness to be found at every stage of life.

DIANA ATHILL was born in 1917. She helped Andre Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. She is the author of eight volumes of memoirs - Stet, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, Alive, Alive Oh!, A Florence Diary - a collection of letters, Instead of a Book, and a novel, Don't Look At Me Like That, all published by Granta, as well as a collection of short stories, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (Persephone Books). In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She died in January 2019.

'Athill's signature is precise, crisp phrasing of the kind that has the readerscrabbling for something with which to underline it... Full of life in theshadow of death' - Caroline Criado-Perez, Observer 'A gloriously wise and knowing collection of memories... [written] with herusual clarity, frankness and unsentimentality' - Independenton Sunday