Jigsaw
Synopsis
Jigsaw is set in the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story of her scholar-gipsy childhood and of her many teachers, beginning with her father, a pleasure-loving German baron, and her brilliant, beautiful, erratic mother. Later, on the Mediterranean coast of France, she meets the artists and intellectuals who will show her the way to a life’s work in literature, among them the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria.
Author Biography
Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Charlottenburg, Germany. In the mid-1930s, upon the Nazi Party’s discovery of her partly Jewish descent, she left Germany and obtained a British passport through a marriage of convenience to an English Army officer in 1935. She published her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico, in 1953. Three years later she published A Legacy, which became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic after Evelyn Waugh reviewed it in The Spectator. She also wrote the novels A Favourite of the Gods, A Compass Error and Jigsaw, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. When Aldous Huxley, a close personal friend, died in 1963, she spent six years researching and then writing the two-volume Aldous Huxley: a biography (1973-74). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was made a Companion of Literature in 1994. In 1981 she was appointed OBE. She died in February 2006.
