Miss Herbert
  • Published: 1 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099513223
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $32.99

Miss Herbert

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'Thoughtful and frequently hilarious... It is also a work of art, a new form' - A.S. Byatt, Financial Times

The secret history of novelists is often a history of exile and tourism - a history of language learning. Like the story of Gustave Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, it is a history of loss and mistakes. As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost.

Miss Herbert provides a map to the imaginary country shared between writers and readers. For translation, and emigration, is the way into a new history of the novel. We assume that we can read novels in translation. We also assume that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. Miss Herbert explores the solutions to this conundrum.

This book demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams. And it includes a slim appendix: 'Mademoiselle O', a story by Vladimir Nabokov, which he worked on in three languages, over thirty years, and whose original French version is now translated into English by Adam Thirlwell.

Adam Thirlwell was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013.
  • Published: 1 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099513223
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

portrait photo of Adam Thirlwell

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Praise for Miss Herbert

This year's most richly pleasurable reading experience

Sunday Telegraph

A deft and thought-provoking piece of work

Independent on Sunday

Something good on every page

Michael Hofmann, Guardian

There is a beguiling and completely uncategorisable quality about Miss Herbert…its elegance, wit and companionable charm will elude only those of the narrowest disposition… Miss Herbert is the book from this year I would most like to buy as a gift for the people I like

Sunday Herald

A scintillating figure-of-eight skate around, inter alia, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz and Nabokov, on the theme of style and translation, a one-off like a novel with everything cut except the digressions, and an interesting fact on every page

Tom Stoppard, Guardian

Fascinating

Scotland on Sunday

His book shoves its delirious way around and through four centuries of great novelists, tumbles them down one trapdoor and hauls them out of another; it provokes as much as evokes and, in general, sets up a dance whose music he partly finds in them and partly invents for them...a prodigy and, as such, unstoppable...a treasure

Richard Eder, New York Times

The most exciting piece of literary criticism to be published here in some time... An intellectual thrill-ride packed with rhetorical fireworks

Marc Weingarten, LA Weekly

Truly raises questions that are vital to novelists and their readers; it will be hard for anyone with an interest in the subject to keep from defiling the margins with notes. Mr. Thirlwell quotes Laurence Sterne: "A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads...'tis like reading himself, and not the book." That effect is palpable here

Nicholas Desai, Wall Street Journal

There is a beguiling and completely uncategorisable quality ... it's elegance, wit and companionable charm will elude only those of the narrowest disposition... the book from this year I would most like to buy as a gift for the people I like

Sunday Herald

Eclectic and full of entertaining anecdotes...It is beautifully produced, replete with photographs and other literary distractions...Thirlwell's literary criticism is often sharp...He has interesting things to say about style

New Statesman