Lifescapes

I think of my work as catching souls. . . It is soul that I go looking for. Or, to put it another way, real life.

'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is.

In Lifescapes, the acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls. In a dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry, she reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing real life on the page. Through the lives of others and her own, through people she has known intimately, studied intensely, or glimpsed only fleetingly, she movingly and thrillingly explores what makes a life and what we leave behind. From biography Wroe moves to intimations of a far greater life, one experienced in childhood, in the writing of poetry, dreams, birth and death.

Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is the work of a lifetime, and a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.