Lions and Shadows

The debut work by the author of The Berlin Stories: an autobiographical novel of his days as a Cambridge medical student and struggling writer in London.

Subtitled “An Education in the Twenties,” Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to Cambridge dropout-at-large in London’s bohemia. Throughout, Isherwood shares thinly veiled portraits of his contemporaries, including W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and Stephen Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.