You've Had Your Time

Description

Taking up where Little Wilson and Big God left off, You've Had Your Time is the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography. It begins in 1959, with the author's return from Brunei, and the start of a long and prolific writing career, and ends, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1982, with the centenary celebrations of the birth of James Joyce, which prompt Burgess to certain conclusions about the relationship between literature and life. Full of extraordinary vignettes (Borges and Burgess conducting a conversation in Anglo-Saxon, for example), as rich, varied and hectic as the nomadic literary life it describes, this is the astonishingly frank autobiography of an extraordinary literary genius. Rarely, if ever, has a writer exposed his inner life so completely and rarely has a writer's life been described - by anyone - with such vigour, polymathic humour and linguistic verve.

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he decided to try to live by writing. A prolific and respected author, Burgess died in 1993.

Extraordinarily lively, amazingly zestful, gutsy, bawdy fun * Sunday Express * This autobiography, packed with extraordinary moments... provides a unique picture of today's literary world. It also has the effect of pinning Burgess down, making him, improbable as he is, real and believable. We will, I think read him better for this, and appreciate him more * Observer * What Burgess ''shows off'' in these pages is the vivid interest that a writer's life can hold when it is lived by a writer with a robust temperament, a showman's appetite for vulgarity and the kind of gargantuan, omnivorous learning that helps give polymathy a good name... You've Had Your Time is an exhilarating book which, like the best of Burgess's novels, fulfills the ancient obligations of delighting, instructing and moving with incomparable panache * Independent * In two huge volumes of "confessions" Burgess wove a vast tapestry of his life. William Boyd, an admirer, said they were among the best novels that Burgess ever wrote * Guardian *