Flokkur: Nýjar bækur

Raised by scientifically minded parents, Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec: a vast playground for her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother. It was an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful.

From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would become Cat’s Eye to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.

As she explores her past, Atwood reveals more and more about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our boldest imaginations.

God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.

The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.

She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.

As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again – the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.