Biography of X How to Think Like

FICTION £18.99 / £12.99 April Royal 234 × 153mm HB / export TPB 352pp No Canada rights Serial and audio rights 978 1 78378 927 6 (HB) 978 1 78378 979 5 (export TPB) The title of this book – as titles so often are – is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey

A masterfully constructed counter-factual epic novel chronicling the life, times and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X – iconoclastic artist and writer – dies suddenly, her widow, CM, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Wild with grief, she traces X’s peripatetic life through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker, opening a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the USA after World War II.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect, blending fiction and non-fiction, Biography of X is a roaring masterwork that plumbs the depths of grief, art and love.

Praise for Catherine Lacey:

‘[She] is one of a generation of American women who seem entirely unafraid’ Anne Enright

‘One of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation’ Lauren Groff catherine lacey is the author of three previous novels and a collection of stories. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

PEW

BPB £8.99 978 1 78378 519 3

THE ANSWERS

BPB £8.99 978 1 78378 218 5

CERTAIN AMERICAN STATES

BPB £8.99 978 1 78378 221 5

NOBODY IS EVER MISSING

BPB £8.99 978 1 78378 089 1