{"product_id":"esmond-and-ilia-isbn-9781681376448","title":"Esmond and Ilia","description":"\u003cb\u003eBy one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMarina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. As Allied forces fought their way north through Italy, Esmond found himself in the southern town of Bari, where Ilia had grown up, one of four girls of a widowed mother. The Englishman approaching middle age and the twenty-one-year-old Italian were soon married. Before the war had come to an end, Ilia was on her way alone to London to wait for her husband’s return and to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIlia begins to learn the world of cricket, riding, canned food, and distant relations she has landed in, while Esmond, in spite of his connections, struggles to support his wife and young daughter. He comes up with the idea of opening a bookshop, a branch of W.H. Smith’s, in Cairo, where he had spent happy times during the North African campaign. In Egypt, however, nationalists are challenging foreign influences, especially British ones, and before long Cairo is on fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeeply felt, closely observed, rich with strange lore, \u003ci\u003eEsmond and Ilia\u003c\/i\u003e is a picture of vanished worlds, a portrait of two people struggling to know each other and themselves, a daughter’s story of trying to come to terms with a past that is both hers and unknowable to her. It is an “unreliable memoir”—what memoir isn’t?—and a lasting work of literature, lyrical, sorrowful, shaped by love and wonder.“The book, largely constructed from documents, family stories and imaginative projection, recaptures a worldly, decadent atmosphere.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e “Top 50 Nonfiction Books of the Year”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In each chapter, Warner grounds us in history and then flies off on the wings of poesy, writing dialogue and rendering psychology like a novelist. . . . \u003ci\u003eEsmond and Ilia\u003c\/i\u003e is a book of desire and its frustrations: the excitement of romance but also its curdling; the archival fever that takes over, that enlivens and maddens the historian.” —Anthony Domestico, \u003ci\u003eCommonweal Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eEsmond and Ilia\u003c\/i\u003e lacks a fairy-tale ending—after all, it’s about real life—but it is nonetheless wondrously entertaining, an ideal book for a long, hot summer.\" —Michael Dirda, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In each chapter, Warner grounds us in history and then flies off on the wings of poesy, writing dialogue and rendering psychology like a novelist. . . . Warner, who has published dozens of books and writes frequently for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e and several other publications, is too varied a thinker to pigeonhole.\" —Anthony Domestico, \u003ci\u003eCommonweal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Warner is an expert on all facets of myth, legend and fairy tale, whose writings have explored everything from Ovid to the Brothers Grimm to the \u003ci\u003eArabian Nights\u003c\/i\u003e. As such, it makes sense that even a personal work recounting eight years of her parents’ life should be envisioned as a story of the power of narrative, the clash of cultures and the role of the heroine, told by means of lore, symbols and allegory. . . . In recounting the story of these early years of the couple’s marriage, Warner weaves together fact and fiction in the most dazzling and inventive ways. —Lucy Scholes, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Ms. Warner. . .  knows that every family story is also a fairy tale, if told the right way; just as every fairy tale gains its purchase in the imagination through its overlap with lived reality. . . .  With \u003ci\u003eEsmond and Ilia\u003c\/i\u003e, her memoir-cum-fable of the hoopoe and the porpoise, Ms. Warner has reopened the window that slammed down so abruptly on her childhood’s golden age, and let the light back in.\" —Liesl Schillinger, \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wonderful—a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination, shimmering with images, sounds and scents, conjuring a clash of lives, worlds and words.” —Jenny Uglow\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Talismanic objects—handmade English brogues, nasturtium sandwiches, an Egyptian cigarette tin—prove the perfect springboard for Warner’s superb visual imagination and historical acumen in this fine memoir, which touchingly evokes, in vivid sensual detail, the irreconcilable contradictions in her parents’ lives within the complex postwar cultural milieus they traversed.” —Victoria Nelson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An entrancing weave of memoir, history, autobiography, and fiction, this adventurous book voyages through time and space to rediscover, reimagine, and reinvent a lost world. One of Marina Warner’s most beautiful works.” —Michèle Roberts\u003cb\u003eMarina Warner\u003c\/b\u003e’s studies of religion, mythology, and fairy tales include \u003ci\u003eAlone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFrom the Beast to the Blonde\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eStranger Magic\u003c\/i\u003e. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2015 she was given the Holberg Prize and in 2017 she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature. She has contributed to a number of NYRB Classics, including Robert Kirk's \u003ci\u003eThe Secret Commonwealth\u003c\/i\u003e and Leonora Carrington's \u003ci\u003eDown Below\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives in London.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304469975269,"sku":"NP9781681376448","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681376448.jpg?v=1767726361","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/esmond-and-ilia-isbn-9781681376448","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}