A The Times &Sunday Times Literary Nonfiction Book of the Year
''Fascinating... Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing'' Sunday Times
''Gripping... A story well told.'' New York Times Book Review
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2020
In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist with a recently acquired PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subj
