Esmond and Ilia

Praise

“The book, largely constructed from documents, family stories and imaginative projection, recaptures a worldly, decadent atmosphere.” —Washington Post “Top 50 Nonfiction Books of the Year”

“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. . . . Esmond and Ilia 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, Commonweal Magazine

“Esmond and Ilia 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, The Washington Post

“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 The New York Review of Books and several other publications, is too varied a thinker to pigeonhole.” —Anthony Domestico, Commonweal

“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 Arabian Nights. 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, New York Times

“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 Esmond and Ilia, 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, Wall Street Journal

“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

“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

“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