You've Had Your Time

Taking up where Little Wilson and Big God left off, You've Had Your Time is the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography. It begins in 1959, with the author's return from Brunei, and the start of a long and prolific writing career, and ends, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1982, with the centenary celebrations of the birth of James Joyce, which prompt Burgess to certain conclusions about the relationship between literature and life. Full of extraordinary vignettes (Borges and Burgess conducting a conversation in Anglo-Saxon, for example), as rich, varied and hectic as the nomadic literary life it describes, this is the astonishingly frank autobiography of an extraordinary literary genius. Rarely, if ever, has a writer exposed his inner life so completely and rarely has a writer's life been described - by anyone - with such vigour, polymathic humour and linguistic verve.