Storm Jameson Books

One of the 20th century's finest memoirs of literary and political life, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, who referred to the book as “literary gold” “Stops you in your tracks. I would like to persuade everyone to read it” — Sunday Times A compulsively readable, beautifully written account of a fascinating twentieth-century woman and life. This candid, affecting portrait of a woman who loathed domesticity explores how she sought to balance a literary career with political commitment. Towards the end of her life, the writer Storm Jameson began her memoir by asking, “can I make sense of my life?” This question propelled her through an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her early years in Whitby, shadowed by her tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and repeated flights from settled domesticity; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always dogged by a lack of money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany. In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells also of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, travels in Europe as fascism was rising and a 1945 trip to recently liberated Warsaw. Throughout, she casts an unsparing eye on her own motivations and psychology, providing a rigorously candid and lively portrait of her life and times.

Seventy years since Anne began her diary . . . '12th June, 1942- I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.' In the summer of 1942, fleeing the horrors of the Nazi occupation, Anne Frank and her family were forced into hiding in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Aged thirteen when she went into the secret annexe, Anne kept a diary in which she confided her innermost thoughts and feelings, movingly revealing how the eight people living under these extraordinary conditions coped with the daily threat of discovery and death, being cut off from the outside world, petty misunderstandings and the unbearable strain of living like prisoners. An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, this is the definitive edition of the diary of Anne Frank. 'A modern classic.' The Times'Rings down the decades as the most moving testament to the persecution of innocence.' Daily Mail'Astonishing and excruciating. Its gnaws at us still.' New York Times Book Review'A monument to the human spirit.' Mail on Sunday