The Berlin Novels
About this ebook
Mr Norris Changes Trains, the first of Isherwood's classic Berlin novels, begins with a chance encounter. On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris. So begins a close friendship – yet there is something sinister about Bradshaw’s new companion.
Goodbye to Berlin inspired the musical Cabaret and the play I Am a Camera. Having recently moved to the city, Christopher becomes enamoured with its local denizens and the colourful lives they lead. Yet as Hitler’s shadow grows taller, each of his new acquaintances comes under threat, passing their days in a city, and a world, on the brink of ruin.
‘Brilliant sketches of a society in decay’ George Orwell
‘The Berlin Novels are masterpieces, funny, darkly innocent explorations of a Berlin in the thirties that is now as firmly in the past as Pompeii’ Observer
‘More than any other foreign writer, Isherwood’s fictional autobiography – or autobiographical fiction – has shaped Berlin’ Guardian
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About the author
Christopher Isherwood was born at High lane, Cheshire, in 1904. He left Cambridge without graduationg, tried briefly to study medicine and in 1928 published All the Conspirators, followed by a second novel, The Memorial in 1932. From 1928 onwards he lived mostly out of England: four years in Berlin, five in various European countries including Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. In 1939 he went to California, which became his home for the rest of his life. His Berlin experiences produced two novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939).
Isherwood worked with the American Friends Service Committee during part of the war. In 1946 he became a US citizen. Following his move to America he wrote five novels - Prater Violet, The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and A Meeting by the River; a travel book about South America, The Condor and the Cows; and Ramakrishna and his Disciples, a biography of the great Indian mystic.
In 1971 he published Kathleen and Frank, a book based on the correspondence of his parents and his mother's diary, in 1977 Christopher and his Kind, an autobiographical account of the years 1929 to 1939, and in 1980 My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his friendship with the Swami Prabhavananda. He died in 1986.
