New Releases by Hilary Spurling

Absorbing and provocative, a biography of George Orwell''s controversial second wife from the Whitbread Prize-winning author of Matisse the Master and Anthony Powell Just three months before his death, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four took a new wife. Sonia Brownell was model for Julia in Orwell''s most famous novel, she was fifteen years younger than her husband, and after his death she was hounded and pilloried as a manipulative gold-digger who would stop at nothing to keep control of the literary legacy. But the truth about Sonia was altogether different. Beautiful, intelligent and fiercely idealistic, she lived at the heart of London''s literary and artistic scene before her marriage to Orwell changed her life for ever. Those who knew her - Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus - witnessed her great personal generosity. And yet, burdened with the almost impossible task of protecting Orwell''s intellectual estate, Sonia''s loyalty to her late husband brought her nothing but poverty and despair.

The much honored biographer unearths the life and work of Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels captured ordinary life in China.

Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck''s father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family''s budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah''s Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.

A unique reference book for all fans of Anthony Powell''s 12-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, which has become a literary landmark of twentieth-century writing. More than a simple glossary, Invitation to the Dance contains extensive Character, Book, Painting and Place indices, creating a magnificent database of Powell''s imagination and England''s cultural landscape. This is a masterpiece of ''extreme ingenuity'' detailing over four hundred characters and one million words of Powell''s lively fifty-year dance of fiction and fact. ''Hilary Spurling''s exhaustive analysis of the novel''s characters supplies a master-key for the reader of Anthony Powell.

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Matisse and the Model, at Eykyn Maclean, New York, Curated by Ann Dumas.

"A thrilling portrait of the extraordinary childhood of Pearl Buck, the now-forgotten bestselling Nobel Prize winning novelist and author of The Good Earth. Pearl Buck foresaw China''s future as a superpower long before anyone else. She witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution as a teenager, and narrowly esacped being killed herself in the subsequent battles between Communists and Nationalists. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries but she spoke Chinese before she learnt English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the Boxers'' terrorist uprising forced her family to flee for their lives..." -- cover verso.

Une biographie magistrale qui a nécessité plus de huit années de recherches. La minutie et la rigueur n''empêchent pourtant pas de la lire comme un roman, puisque le style demeure vivant. Avec anecdotes, témoignages et correspondance. [SDM].

Este magno y exhaustivo análisis de Hilary Spurling, premiada por esta obra con el codiciado Premio Whitbread, recorre con minucia la vida y la trayectoria de Matisse, y ésta demuestra ser la mejor manera para comprender tanto las obras individuales del pintor como su impresionante trayectoria y la evolución de sus ideas respecto a las artes plásticas. No sólo nos encontramos ante la más completa y definitiva biografía de uno de los pintores más célebres, sino de un espléndido retrado de los ambientes artísticos en que se desarrolló su obra. A esto se une una investigación muy rigurosa con información inédita del artista procedente de entrevistas y el talento narrativo de Spurling al entreverar la evolución biográfica y personal con la artística.

With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse''s attempts to counteract the violence of the 20th century in paintings.

Otoño de 1940: ha estallado la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Llueven bombas sobre Londres; los teatros han cerrado, y de noche reina la oscuridad por miedo a la aviación enemiga. Una joven rubia y pálida, que parece salida de un lienzo de Renoir, acaba de aceptar la oferta laboral de Horizon, una revista que se erigirá en referente cultural europeo.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition by the same name to be held at Musaee Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambraesis, Oct. 23, 2004-January 25 2005, Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 5-May 30 2005, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 23-September 25, 2005.

Analyse : Roman historique. Roman de société.

Une biographie magistrale qui a nécessité plus de huit années de recherches. La minutie et la rigueur n''empêchent pourtant pas de la lire comme un roman, puisque le style demeure vivant. Avec anecdotes, témoignages et correspondance. [SDM].

S''assurer la confiance de la famille Matisse fut primordial dans l''entreprise de Hilary Spurling. Cette biographie rend hommage au génie de Matisse. Elle s''appuie à la fois sur des documents rares et des témoignages.

Thérèse Humbert was the "assumed illegitimate daughter of an American billioniare," but when her hoax was revealed, she spent five years at hard labor. "When she was released from prison, she vanished, and the fantastic story of her life was mostly hushed up, because it had disgraced so many wealthy and important people."--Jacket.