PENGUIN DECADES

Another Part of the Wood

Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool in 1934. Educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, and expelled for a minor misdemeanor, she began her working life as an actress at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (an experience she drew on for her novel An Awfully Big Adventure), but with young children to bring up she took to writing. Her first novel, A Weekend with Claude, was published in 1967. She has written eighteen novels altogether, most recently According to Queeney, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize a record five times.

She was awarded a DBE in 2000, and in 2003 won the prestigious David Cohen Prize for Literature, together with the poet Thom Gunn. She lives in north London.

Another Part of the Wood was the second of Beryl Bainbridge’s novels to be published, in 1968 – publication of Harriet Said followed, though in fact it was written before Another Part of the Wood. These early novels pre-date the historical fiction for which she is now well-known, and feature many of the concerns of the sixties and seventies, but stylistically they share many of the characteristics of her later work.

Lynn Barber studied English at Oxford University. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse, and has since worked for a number of British newspapers and for Vanity Fair. She has won five British Press Awards. Her highly praised memoir An Education was published by Penguin in 2009, and has since become a successful film scripted by Nick Hornby.