A luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure and loss on the banks of the Nile.‘Wonderful – a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination’ JENNY UGLOWInventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman.With diamond rings on her fingers and brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his periods of leave from the desert campaign. There, they start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith’s. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns the city clean.Evocative and imaginative, at once historical and speculative, this memoir powerfully resurrects the fraught union and unrequited hopes of Warner’s parents. Memory intertwines richly with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile. Vivid recollections of Cairo swirl with ever-present dreams of a city where Warner’s parents, friends and associates are still restlessly wandering.

Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

WARNER, Marina

Arts & Literature

William Collins

Alone of All Her Sex

Religion & Spirituality

Vintage

When a mummy in the Museum of Albion is unpacked it is found to contain a bundle of curious objects and documents which tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto. On the run, in a far-off era of civil strife, Leto gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, stows away on a ship loaded with plundered antiquities and then works as a maid in a war-torn city. She loses her son but saves her daughter during a long siege. As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe and into the present day, Leto reappears in different guises. Eventually she becomes a servant to a rock singer, and begins to search for her son.

The Leto Bundle

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC

Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights

History

Vintage Books

Marina Warner has gathered together a magical collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. These are passionate, extraordinary, and occasionally proto-feminist retellings of classic fairy stories by women who ingeniously used the fairy tale genre to comment on their own times and experiences. The stories are all in superb new translations by celebrated writers, including A. S. Byatt, Gilbert Adair and John Ashbery. With a brilliant intorduction by Marina Warner, recognised as one of our greatest experts on myth and fairy tale.

Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment

Monuments & Maidens

Politics & Social Sciences

Women's Studies

Joan has a unique role in Western imagination--she is one of the few true female heroes. Marina Warner uses her superb historical and literary skills to move beyond conventional biography and to capture the essence of Joan of Arc, both as she lived in her own time and as she has "grown" in the human imagination over the five centuries since her death. She has examined the court documents from Joan of Arc's 1431 Inquisition trial for heresy and woven the facts together with an analysis of the histories, biographies, plays, and paintings and sculptures that have appeared over time to honor this heroine and symbol of France's nationhood. Warner shows how the few facts that are known about the woman Joan have been shaped to suit the aims of those who have chosen her as their hero. The book places Joan in the context of the mythology of the female hero and takes note of her historical antecedents, both pagan and Christian and the role she has played up to the present as the embodiment of an ideal, whether as Amazon, saint, child of nature, or personification of virtue.

Joan Of Arc: Image Female

Community & Culture

In A Dark Wood

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism

Historical

Penguin

Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation. Shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder, and enlivens classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and uncanny fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, acclaimed novelist and critic Marina Warner explores the metaphorical power of metamorphoses in the evocation of human personality. Beginning with Ovid's great poem, The Metamorphoses, as the founding text of the metamorphic tradition, she takes us on a journey of exploration, into the fantastic art of Hieronymous Bosch, the legends of the Taino people, the life cycle of the butterfly, the myth of Leda and the Swan, the genealogy of the Zombie, the pantomime of Aladdin, the haunting of doppelgangers, the coming of photography, and the late fiction of Lewis Carroll. Beautifully illustrated and elegantly written, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds is sure to appeal to all readers interested in mythology, art, and literature.

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature)

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

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Books by WARNER, Marina