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    Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
    Unavailable
    Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
    Unavailable
    Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
    Audiobook13 hours

    Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography

    Written by P. D. James

    Narrated by Patience Tomlinson

    5/5

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    About this audiobook

    P. D. James' extraordinary memoir of her early life and time starting out as a novelist as well as diaries recording her in old age.

    In this intriguing and very personal book, part diary, part memoir, P. D. James considers the twelve months of her life between her 77th and 78th birthdays, and looks back on her earlier life.

    With all her familiar skills as a writer she recalls what it was like to be a schoolgirl in the 1920s and 1930s in Cambridge, and then giving birth to her second daughter during the worst of the Doodlebug bombardment in London during the war. It follows her work, starting out as an administrator in the National Health Service, then on to the Home Office in the forensic and criminal justice departments. She later served as a Governor of the BBC, an influential member of the British Council, the Arts Council and the Society of Authors, and eventually entering the House of Lords.

    Along the way, this diary and personal memoir deals with her burgeoning reputation as a novelist, starting with Cover Her Face in 1962, and with the craft of the classical detective story. She also details the writing of one of her most intriguing and carefully researched books, A Certain Justice.

    This wonderful memoir will enthrall aficionados of detective fiction, and will also appeal to anyone who lived through those turbulent years of the twentieth century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFaber & Faber
    Release dateMar 19, 2015
    ISBN9780571319633
    Unavailable
    Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography
    Author

    P. D. James

    P. D. James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford in 1920. She worked in the National Health Service and the Home Office From 1949 to 1968, in both the Police Department and Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy, and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature. She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991.

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