Germs: A Memoir of Childhood - Richard Wollheim

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Richard Wollheim grew up lonely and sad in London's wealthy suburbs during the 1920s and 1930s, yet his was a childhood more interesting than most. He had an impresario father and a "Gaiety Girl" mother; together they attracted important guests (Diaghilev, Kurt Weill, Serge Lifar) to the grand houses and hotels that punctuated the landscape of Wollheim's early years. Germs is his account of that time, of the years he spent adoring his charming but distant father; of his regret for loathing his beautiful, mindless mother. Told in prose that with hypnotic ease moves from deadpan comedy to poignant loneliness, Germs is already a classic work of memoir.

'A frighteningly good memoir' - Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books; 'Wollheim's powers of description astound...Because of the intensity with which a remarkable man has offered us a view of his inner self, I doubt whether anyone who has read it will forget it' - Diana Athill, Literary Review; 'Germs is not only elegantly written; it is a human document of considerable power and importance' - John Armstrong, Independent; 'Pungently truthful, complex and original' - Alan Hollinghurst, Guardian

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