Literary biography is supposed to be dead. Time was when ‘big literary biographies were the goal of every serious editor,’ Faber’s Neil Belton recalls. ‘The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes,’ he says. But these monumental works ‘cost publishers a fortune’, and literary historians were forced to lower their horizons.
But Belton has published a book that defies the trend: Matthew Hollis’s All Roads lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. The book was shortlisted for this year’s Costa Award, having received so much critical and popular acclaim. Radio 4 — the route to commercial success — featured it as one of their books of the week last autumn, and the commentator Robert McCrum named it the ‘outstanding book on the [Costa] list’.
Hollis is a poet by trade, but his flair for dramatic atmosphere is worthy of a playwright.
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