HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

The novelist's account of his college days and early formative friendships, Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the true education of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to dropout-at-large in London's bohemia of the 1920s. The book evokes the atmosphere of Cambridge as Isherwood knew it and describes his life as a tutor, a medical student, and a struggling writer. Forced to withdraw from Cambridge University, "Christopher Isherwood" works as a tutor to the privileged, serves as the secretary to a busy string quartet, ill-fatedly attends medical school. Above all, Lions and Shadows is a captivating account of a young novelist's development in the literary culture of 1920s Cambridge and London and of his experiences as he forged lifelong friendships with his brilliant contemporaries W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Edward Upward, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion changed the literary identity of England in the 1930s.

Although the story is Isherwood's own life story, carrying him up to the age of twenty-five, he gives free rein to his remarkable powers of dramatization, improving on the facts here and there, to make a highly entertaining, sometimes hilarious book. "Read it as a novel," says Christopher Isherwood. There is no difficulty taking his advice. But his characters were real people, and when the first of his autobiographical writings was published, by the legendary Hogarth Press in 1938, it transformed their lives into legend.

What people say:

"In Lions and Shadows it's impossible to determine where truth ends and fiction begins – impossible and unnecessary because the very ambiguity makes the charm of the book." — The New York Times

"Here is the enchanting story of how a young man made himself into an important writer." — The Saturday Review

"That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands." — W. Somerset Maugham, after reading Lions and Shadows

"Isherwood is the best prose writer in English." — Gore Vidal

About the Author:

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a British-born American writer who worked in many genres, including fiction, drama, film, travel, and autobiography. He was born in Manchester, England, and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, he wrote more than twenty books.