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The Bodley Head has won a four-way auction for a personal history of contemporary Europe by “Britain’s greatest commentator on European affairs”, Timothy Garton Ash.
Publishing director Stuart Williams bought British Commonwealth rights from Natasha Fairweather at Roger Coleridge & White in a multi-publisher auction. Europe in Our Time: A Personal History will be published in 2022.
The synopsis explains: “Europe in Our Time: A Personal History draws on 50 years of encounters, interviews, family history and experience. It tells the story of how Europe, having emerged from its wartime hell, recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close, in the early 21st century, to the ideal of a Europe ‘whole, free and at peace’. And then faltered."
Garton Ash has covered European politics for half a century, witnessing some of the continent's most dramatic scenes and interviewing its key players. He is professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and has won many prizes for his journalism and books.
He said: “Everything we have achieved in Europe is now at risk. Brexit or no Brexit, Britain is as much part of this European drama as it has always been. I'm delighted to be publishing my personal account of Europe's extraordinary story with Bodley Head and Vintage.”
Williams said: “This is the most engaging writing about Europe I have read in years—humane, expert, deeply felt without being partisan. It’s full of encounters, conversations and anecdote and is all the more alive for being so highly personal. It will move readers. It will also illuminate what Europe is, what the dreams that animate its citizens have been, and what too the nightmares that haunt them.”